Hate to do it, but Real Life ™ is kicking my butt right now.
Which in a way is good, you know? It’s a nice reminder that there are only a few things in life we can even affect, much less control. It’s fun to talk about the stuff we do here, but when it comes down to it, all a man can really do is tend his garden…
Tomorrow’s Friday, so if you have any Mailbag Questions, I’d appreciate it. Thanks for understanding, comrades.
So…. what are we reading these days?
Among my stack is the last volume of Jonathan Sumption’s five-volume history of the Hundred Years’ War, which covers the period between the Death of Henry V and the Battle of Castillon. (1420s-1460s). I’m working backwards, as for one I’m most interested in the 15th century, and for two I’m a bit more familiar with the earlier phases of the war. It’s an epic; the AI thingie says that this is the definitive account of the War, and I tend to believe it. Good stuff.
It also goes to show you the kind of work a trained amateur can do. Sumption is not a professional historian; he’s a lawyer. I can’t recommend his work enough.
So…what’s up with you?
So sayeth Aman-duh, anyway, and I’m sure it’ll be good for a few chuckles, which are in desperately short supply these days.
Why MAGA men actually loathe tradwives
And the subhead:
A new study shows submissive women aren’t cherished but are held in contempt
Is that what “tradwives” are supposed to be? Submissive? I know next to nothing about this phenomenon, comrades. Up to now, I’ve figured “tradwife” is a subset of “Evangelical,” which is a synonym for “MAGA,” which just means “bad.” As Z Man (PBUH) used to say, you could just use “the boogeyman” for any of this — do a find-and-replace on whatever leftoid term du jour, swapping it out for “the boogeyman,” and the rest of the article would read exactly the same; you wouldn’t have to change another word.
But now I’m kinda curious.
Still, before I read word one of this, let me lay down a bet (as is my usual practice): What Aman-duh’s “study” is really going to find is that “MAGA men” don’t like e-thots, digital b-girls, poseurs and grifters and so on. You know the kind of thing I mean. This is just from the site’s image files:
I forget who that is, but that’s the kind of thing I mean. You can tell she’s not a “tradwife” from all the tats, but it’s your same basic e-thot look. Whoever that person is, she (or, I’m sure, xzhey) is obviously some kind of digital grifter. I’d put pretty long money down on the prop bet that “any woman who advertises herself online as a ‘tradwife’ is basically just a whore; she’s trying to snag a beta to pay her bills.” Which is what “MAGA men” don’t like.
But before we see if I’m right, I guess we should do our due diligence. Forgive me if y’all already know this, but it’s new information to me:
A tradwife (a portmanteau of the words traditional and wife) is a member of an internet subculture made up of women who promote traditional gender roles, often on social media.
So… yeah. There it is. It’s a grift. Promoting traditional gender roles on social media is a contradiction in terms. Traditional gender roles are about family and community; they can’t be done online.
It was partially born out of the number of women that felt unseen by the fourth wave of feminism that mainly centers awareness for sexual assault, however has been interpreted to mainly apply to women in the workplace.
Such a revealing word, “unseen.” And those are your choices, I guess — get yourself “sexually assaulted,” or be “unseen” forever.
As a hashtag and aesthetic, #tradwife has gained a lot of traction on social media, particularly TikTok. Many creators have gone viral for videos performing domestic labor such as cooking, cleaning, and caring for children.
The keyword there being “performing,” and I have to say, comrades, this is suddenly getting very interesting, professionally speaking. This is the kind of thing Cultural Historians drool for. Cooking and cleaning are now performances, you say? What were they before? Whatever did you do before you were able to broadcast yourself doing basic life maintenance tasks? Or did you just not do them?
(I strongly suspect the latter, comrades. 30 years ago, I kept my swingin’ bachelor pad in a state of perpetual readiness, in case some girl of my acquaintance might want to come over… which meant I didn’t have three weeks’ worth of dirty dishes piled in the sink, you could actually see the floor (which had been vacuumed at least once that month), there wasn’t a ring of disgusting scunge around the bathtub and toilet bowl, and so on. You know, your basic “don’t get your place condemned as a biohazard” level of cleanliness. Along similar lines, I had enough food in the fridge and pantry that I could whip up at least a basic meal for two on the spot.
My personal habits haven’t changed in 30 years, but in that time — according to the women who’ve come over — my pad has gone from “just barely acceptable” to some kind of Temple of Hygiene. I’ve been called a neat freak, even, and of course the girls who said that looked at me frying up a few eggs like I was splitting the fucking atom or something right there in front of them).
The videos often involve an aesthetic that is purported to be reminiscent of a housewife during the 1950s or the Victorian era.
So they’re cosplaying. Well, at least they have good (if mercenary) taste — the aesthetic of the late Victorian Era, like that of the late 1930s (which is really what that “Fifties” aesthetic is; the war put fashion on hold for a decade) is friendly to the Postmodern female physique. The Late Victorian aesthetic is good for hiding a few pounds, and I’m sure I don’t have to tell this crowd that your “1940s” pinup-type look is about the most flattering ever devised for a woman with near-normal BMI. The hairstyles leave a bit to be desired in a lot of cases — you can’t have everything — but this
is sexy without being overt. It’s cut close enough to be flattering if you’ve got anything at all under there, but loose enough to be forgiving if you don’t (and is classy enough not to call attention to it). No goofy shoulder pads or bullet bras (the stupid fads of the later 1950s), just clean, simple lines, tailored just a bit at the waist. The natural waist, not the waist where everyone wears jeans now.
A large number of people felt seen by the increased content of “tradwives” on social media and began to identify with the rejection of working. One of the pioneers of the idea of “tradwife”, Alena Kate Pettitt, wrote two books on the subject of being a woman in the home and not in the workforce.
Annnnnnnd… there it is. The rejection of working. If you’re not hot enough to sustain your chosen lifestyle as an “Instagram influencer” — meaning, you’re not hot enough to tempt some oil sheik to fly you out to the Gulf so he can take a dump on you — get some Herb to foot the bills while you post videos of yourself baking cookies. Got it.
Yeah, I have no idea why “MAGA men” would hold that in contempt.
Let’s see if I’m right. Quotes henceforth are from Aman-duh unless otherwise indicated.
The media fascination with “tradwives” may be fading, but as a social media phenomenon, it’s still going strong. Ballerina Farm, where former ballet dancer Hannah Neeleman makes a spectacle of her wifely submission, has over 10 million Instagram followers, despite a recent scandal over her company’s raw milk sales. She’s not alone. Dozens of other women draw millions of followers by performing traditional wifely duties online.
“Traditional wifely duties,” that’s cute. That was a Victorian-era euphemism for sex. I wonder if Aman-duh knows that, and is trying to go for some rhetorical figure here, or if she’s just using the first word that comes to mind for “chores,” because that’s all she can think of — husband, kids, making a nice home… all chores. You know, the kind of thing she would hire an illegal Salvadoran immigrant to do.
This, apparently, is Ballerina Farm:
Also this:
and this:
So…uhhh… yeah. Because when I think “livin’ the traditional family values life,” I think protein supplements and branded sweatsuits.
Which is fine, you know? I’ve got no problem with protein supplements and branded sweatsuits. I myself subscribe to a few musclehead channels on YouTube; I’m at least willing to give supplements a try; this is really no different than being a model or an actor (which is a distinction without a difference, and has been for going on a century now).
I guess what I’m trying to say is, even if Ballerina Farm et al are making a specifically political pitch –which I’m not sure they are, based on the evidence so far presented, here and at Wikipeida– well, so what? How is that any different than this?
It’s equally curated, and pretty much all their “articles” boil down to Instagram influencing. The medium is the message, right? Do I really need to read whatever screed she’s penned, or can I just look at the authorette’s picture and know everything she has to say, instantly, right down to the punctuation?
It mostly sounds like she’s pissed that the Ballerina Farm girl is doing it better.
Idyllic images of blonde children and perfect homes aren’t the only selling points. The tradwife lifestyle is pitched as a way to earn men’s love and devotion.
Ok. Let us assume that this is a rational desire, in the Marketing sense of “rational” and “desire.” You know, the same sense in which it is “rational” for you, Aman-duh, to “desire” to look like the photo above (which I realize is not of Aman-duh, but is actually Andi Zeisler, but again, a distinction without a difference). I guess the questions now become, “does it work?” and “at what cost?”
By submitting to men, tradwife proponents argue, a woman will activate his chivalric urge to protect and provide.
It’s not the worst argument I’ve ever heard. Does it work?
Submission is portrayed as a fair trade to women.
Again, it’s not the worst argument I’ve ever heard. Does it work?
In exchange for giving up their autonomy, they will receive safety and joy beyond what feminists, with their petty demands for equality and anger at the patriarchy, can never imagine.
Hey, you said it, not me. But since we’re here, let’s discuss how, exactly, the Ballerina Farm girl lacks “equality.” Seems to me like she’s the ramrod of the operation. They’re not calling it “Whatever the Dude Did Before He Quit to Be a Permanent Guest Star on ‘Ballerina Farm’ Farm,” are they? Looking at their apparel store… nope, I can’t get me an authentic Ballerina Farm stetson* like homeboy has in that first picture, nor a branded denim jacket like his. It’s all girl stuff.
*for non-Americans: “Stetson” is a brand name of cowboy hat, but has achieved group identifier status. Just as “xerox” now just means “photocopier,” of whatever brand, “stetson” just means “cowboy hat.”
The “about” section gives us a whole shitload about Hannah — a life story, videos — and next to nothing about Daniel; he might as well be an actor. It’s 99% her, 1% Daniel. Surely you didn’t mean that she lacks equality in the sense of “she really ought to give Daniel more screen time, maybe a better cut of the take”? That’s a damn strange “lack of autonomy,” wouldn’t you agree, if she’s the one basically running the show?
Also, while I’ll cheerfully admit I’m not a “MAGA man,” I’m having a hard time seeing what I’m supposed to be “despising” here. Sounds to me like I need to get me a Hannah of my own, and not in the Sublime sense
(alas, the Internet informs me that he’s singing about a jaina of his own, not a Hannah of his own, but whatever, the music blog kayfabe is too good for strict factual accuracy).
I mean, if she wants to do all the work, I got no problem standing around looking goofy in a stetson. But like I said, I’m not a MAGA man.
A new study published in Psychology of Women Quarterly shows that young men who favor the trad lifestyle don’t honor and cherish tradwives — they hold them in contempt.
Well, that’s me told; I’m off to represent the entire Red Army at the buffet.
I mean, if The Psychology of Women Quarterly (titles are italicized, dipshit; fucking editors, how do they work?) isn’t the definitive source on the attitudes of young men, I don’t know what possibly could be.
And as it turns out, I’m right despite myself:
After surveying nearly 600 men aged 18 to 29, researchers expected to find that those who supported the tradwife movement to have paternalistic attitudes toward women, viewing them as fragile but beloved creatures who needed protecting. Instead, they discovered pro-tradwife men expressed a hostile form of sexism, calling women who submitted to men lazy and parasitic.
No one doubts the scholarly rigor of the Psychology of Women Quarterly, but did you ask them about actual “tradwives” — assuming such exist — or the online version? Because see above, passim. You know, all that stuff about them really exploring the studio space when it comes to not working, getting a man to pay all their bills, and so forth.
This may seem like a paradox at first blush. These men loathe housewives while simultaneously believing that women should be housewives. But sociologist Jessica Calarco, who teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is the author of “Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net,” is not surprised.
Again, comrades, I figured this would be good for a few yuks at most, but I’m fascinated despite myself. Cultural Historians fucking live for stuff like this. You read what she’s written up to now, and you’re forced to conclude that she really, truly, madly, deeply cannot see the difference between “actual spouses” and “Instagram actors.” Who knows, maybe Hannah and Daniel… Neeleman? did this “tradwife” actually take his name, or does she retain her maiden name for business purposes?.. anyway, Hannah and Daniel Whoever-They-Are, maybe they really do have a wonderful, fulfilling, loving relationship, but from the outside it looks an awful lot like a Reality TV show. You surely remember those? Whatever their relationship actually is, they are functionally actors in a TV show…
…and Aman-duh can’t see it. Neither can this Jessica Calarco person, who looks like this
because of fucking course she does, and neither do any of their readers. They really cannot tell the difference between “Instagram” and “real life.”
“If you hate your wife, it’s a lot easier to justify exploiting her unpaid labor for your own personal gain,” she told me. “With our modern sensibilities, we might think of love as the point of marriage.” But traditional marriage was about male power, she explained, which included “exploiting wives’ domestic labor, forcing them to bear children and using them as emotional or physical punching bags.” Underneath all the happy trappings of tradwife content is a longing to return to a time when women had no rights inside a marriage. Actual love for a “traditional” wife, Calarco concluded, gets in the way of a man “accepting the perks of patriarchy.”
I really hate to do this, y’all, I really do, because armchair psychologizing is one of the pillars of Clown World… but my god, woman, show me on this doll where Daddy your stepfather one of Mommy’s boyfriends touched you. Try as I might, I can’t think of any other explanation for stuff like that.
Nowadays most women aren’t forced to marry for survival, yet elaborate propaganda systems have emerged to bait them into believing that traditional marriage, along with its outdated gender roles, is romantic. The Psychology of Women Quarterly study shows just how much the notion of chivalry is actually a myth. As Calarco said, “Misogynistic men will often ‘lovebomb’ their partners, lavishing them with praise and affection in the early days” in an attempt to convince women to give up their autonomy and outside income. Once they are trapped, though, the men will “drop the facade.”
I’ll leave it to the married NBCs to share with us the “best practices” standards for this kind of thing. I mean… y’all did do that, right? “Love bomb” them, then drop the facade? And that was the point, wasn’t it — to get them to forego their jobs, such that y’all both had to make do with less?
Chivalry is unworkable because it’s simply too dissonant for men. On one hand, as the researchers found, traditional men want the services they believe only women should provide, such as emotional support and housework. But they also believe women are beneath them and, in fact, exist to serve them. So expressing gratitude, much less holding women in respect, is experienced as emasculating. The natural result for a man in this position is what Southern experienced: growing annoyance and resentment at his wife for having the temerity to express any needs at all, instead of functioning simply as a household appliance.
Again, I hate to do this, but… show me on the doll where he touched you.
British journalist Louis Theroux, in his recent Netflix documentary “Inside the Manosphere,” exposes how Southern’s experience is hardly unique.
This is the third time I’ve seen this movie referenced at Karen: The Website, and I’ve only seen it referenced there. Is… is… is all this just some kind of weird viral marketing campaign?
That was what a lot of people took from a 2024 profile of Hannah Neeleman and her husband Daniel a profile of the couple that appeared in the Times of London. After it was published, the Neelemans angrily denied their marriage was unhappy or exploitative, but many readers weren’t convinced. There were too many details suggesting that Daniel Neeleman viewed his wife with exactly the contempt that researchers have found in so many male trad enthusiasts. There was the time, for example, when Hannah asked her incredibly wealthy husband for a Greek vacation for her birthday. He filmed a video of himself giving her an apron instead. There was the way Hannah confessed to the Times reporter that she liked giving birth away from her husband, because she got to enjoy pain medications when he was not around. Then there was his promise to build her a dance studio on their massive estate; he turned it into a schoolhouse for their growing brood of children.
Again, what the Historian sees in all this is vastly different from what Aman-duh’s readers, whoever they are, presumably see. Because the Historian sees what normal people see. They find themselves asking what normal people ask, to wit: Greek vacation? Dance studio? A schoolhouse on the property? Clandestine pill popping? Who the fuck are these people? This is so far from “traditional,” in every conceivable sense of the word, that you might as well be describing Martians. I know lots of married people, and I know a few rich people, and I even know a few rich, married people… but nobody I have ever met has ever come close to the “is thinking about building a personal dance studio inside his massive compound” level of affluence.
Yet we’re supposed to take these people as some kind of exemplars?
Now we have one more study showing that the tradwife hype is just as empty as feminists have always suspected. Traditional patriarchy isn’t some cheat code to make marriage happy. It is and always has been just an excuse for men to treat women poorly.
Annnnd that’s the end of the article, and once more I find myself fascinated. As with “colonialism,” “racism,” and all the rest, I have to wonder: Why do “we” need an excuse? If we’ve already got that much power, why do we bother fucking around with penny-ante justifications like “tradwife”? A good old fashioned “shut up and make me a sandwich, bitch!” ought to do it, no?
The mind boggles, comrades.
(The illustration has nothing to do with the post. I just think it’s funny, and want to get it in the ol’ image bank for future, more appropriate use).
The late, great Z Man (PBUH) introduced me to a new word, “mokita,” which the browser AI thingie says:
Mokita is a term from the Kivila language of Papua New Guinea that refers to a truth everyone knows but no one speaks about. It describes unspoken issues or “quiet lies” that groups agree to ignore to avoid conflict or discomfort, similar to the Western concept of “the elephant in the room”… In leadership and psychology, addressing mokitas is seen as crucial for resolving hidden conflicts, such as a colleague’s poor performance or family dynamics, that otherwise damage relationships and productivity.
How much of Clown World boils down to incorrect, ever-more-costly attempts to address mokitas?
How much of social policy, for example — and huge subfields within social policy, e.g. criminology — are just increasingly desperate attempts to not admit the mokita about black intelligence and behavior? NABALT, of course, but the law of averages is what it is, and a society built around a certain level of, say, future time orientation is going to fail when it tries to incorporate a large group that simply can’t make the cut.
And that, if acknowledged, would lead directly to a confrontation with a bigger mokita, something close to “race essentialism.” A monoethnic society can maintain itself on its own terms. A multiethnic one cannot. It will inevitably collapse to the lowest common denominator, absent a strong controlling force which is able to impose order from the outside. As, for example, Jim Crow — as the impeccably Liberal Daniel Patrick Moynihan pointed out all the way back in 1965.
Of course, being a Liberal, he got the causation wrong — ghetto dysfunction wasn’t caused by Jim Crow; it was caused by the loosening of Jim Crow; Jim Crow was the only thing holding their natural impulses in check. But he was absolutely correct in noting that such integration as had been achieved by 1965 was disastrous for blacks, probably worse in its way than its effects on Whites. That’s the lesser mokita, the one he could admit; social policy, 1965-present, has been an ever more desperate attempt to avoid the greater mokita, the one about black dysfunction being largely hereditary…
…or “structural,” if you want, and maybe that would help to talk about it. A technological society requires X level of future time orientation, however (and in whatever units) you measure it. A group with level (0.5)x just isn’t going to cut it. But in a society built around (0.5)x future time orientation, they’ll do just fine. Drop a bunch of Current Year Whites into, say, Nigeria, and they won’t end up running the place; they’ll probably end up almost as dysfunctional, in their way, as a group of Nigerians are here. Nigerian society simply isn’t built for them.
(I know everyone here is a “race realist,” but even so, I’m sure there are different levels of experience dealing with the OFE. Mine is extensive — I’ve lived near them, among them, and with them. Everything Z Man wrote about “Lagos on the Chesapeake” is true and then some. Navigating life in a majority-black area is like trying to navigate a heavily-armed version of Idiocracy. Every-fucking-thing is a painful ordeal. Nothing works as it should. There’s none of the “fire and forget” convenience of life in White society — if you need one of them to do something, you basically have to do it yourself, constantly riding them until they get it done. If you don’t, they’ll just… forget. Things get done at not-quite-random, but whatever it is that inspires them to do whatever it is that they do, you can almost, but never quite, figure it out. Imagine living in an entire country like that. It would be hell for us, but for them, they’d be living their best lives).
All of which got me thinking about The Greater Mokita (which we can all admit would be a good Indie band name, but I think it deserves capital letters anyway, as a useful category of analysis). Specifically, the Greater Mokita behind the Lesser Mokita, and how the one obscures the other. I’ll give you an example from this very website:
We spend a lot of time trying to figure out why Lefties do what they do. We frequently mull the question “do they really believe all the stupid shit they say?” We do this for lots of reasons, starting with “I’m fascinated by aberrant psychology” and working outward. And from there, I spend a lot of time contemplating policy. Just as Chinese Emperors had to spend so much of their cultural, intellectual, and political power in “managing the barbarians,” so I spend a lot of mine devising schemes — in reality, much closer to “building air castles” — for “managing the Left.”
How, exactly, do we deal with these people?
Looking at their actions, their “beliefs” (if they actually have any), their quirks and tics, and so on, is investigation of the Lesser Mokita. Do they really believe X? The Lesser Mokita is that no, they do not. They say they do, and in many cases they act as if they do, but they don’t; they can instantly drop it, for any value of it, and take up the exact opposite, as soon as the Hive decides. The only common denominator is The Great Inversion: Whatever is, is wrong. That’s the only thing they really believe, and that realization is what I’m calling the Lesser Mokita.
But so what? That’s the Greater Mokita: It doesn’t matter. Why and how they came to believe in The Great Inversion is, I suppose, a worthy study for a Psychology dissertation, or maybe a question for the geneticists, but as a practical matter it’s meaningless. As a practical matter, the only thing we need to know is that these “people” are simply incapable of being happy, or even content. Ever.
That’s it.
The only questions are thus Lenin’s: Who? Whom?
Do unto them before they do unto you, because they will do unto you. They can’t not. So far as Historians can tell, humanity has always had such people. Successful societies have institutionalized ways of dealing with them. A priestly caste is a good start; one of these forever-miserables can really elevate the moral tone of a society, provided their power is carefully circumscribed. Other solutions have suggested themselves in other times and places: the ducking stool, the stake.
There is no, errrrrrr, permanent or enduring solution, because it seems to be a function of prosperity — short of a Mad Max collapse, you’ll always have one or two people who are simply incapable of being content; and even there, the minute you get to the “Bartertown” level of prosperity they’ll pop back up. God created Arrakis to train the faithful, and one can only assume He created caloric surplus for similar reasons. But it will help us, I think, to at least name the Greater Mokita, so we can refer back to it from time to time.
Your thoughts?
At last. Sorry about that.
Quotulatiousness brings us a link of note:
And a pull quote:
Men find communicating with women difficult sometimes, because women communicate in a way that’s a little alien to men. There’s a lot more to it, and the phrase I’m about to type is a gross oversimplification, but it helps men a lot:
Every time anybody says anything to a woman, this statement is filtered through the lens of “what is this person saying about me me me because everything is about me me me”.
Yes, I’m not being fair to women. There’s a lot more to it than this gross oversimplification. But just for purposes of “here’s an easy hack to help men think one step ahead before saying something that pisses a girl off for reasons they don’t understand”, the above works fine.
Take, for example, the infamous sexist act of “mansplaining” — a delightful portmanteau of the words “man” and “explaining” intended to teach us that any time a man explains anything, he’s being sexist.
This isn’t “misogyny,” comrades — it’s a vital Clown World survival skill. When I first started teaching, back around the turn of the Millennium, I was pretty good. Not to toot my own horn or anything, but I think I was, anyway, and student opinion seemed to bear me out. But by the end, I was terrible. Part of that was burnout, of course, but a lot of it came down to me no longer understanding how to “get down,” verbally, with the young people.
And a large part of that, I’ve come to believe, is that I didn’t realize how girly everything had become. Even talking to male students was, by the end, like talking to women. The Eternal Solipsism of the Female Mind had taken over so many of the men, especially the Strivers…
I guess I need to back up slightly. Half the problem with college, in my considerable experience, is that only a fraction of the studentry actually want or need to be there. “Everyone must go to college” is one of the mantras of our age, and so you end up with a lot of kids who don’t see the point of being there, who are just marking time, doing the minimum to get by, etc.
They’re wasting their time, but it won’t do them, or us, too much harm, depending on their level of student loan debt (a separate discussion). If you consider “college” to be “an extra four years of high school” for that kind of kid… eh, I guess. We’d all be better served if they were out in the world, earning a living, but it’s not the worst thing they could do.
But there’s this other class of kid, and they’re the real problem with the “everyone must go to college” mantra of Clown World. Those are the Strivers. The Apparatniks. They don’t know what they’re going to do with their lives, but it’s going to be Important, and that’s because they are Straight A Students. You know, the Front Row Kids.
I could never figure out how to talk to those kids. I thought the best thing I could to to them was to challenge them. You know, inject a little self-awareness. You say you’re a straight-A student, but I need to see it. Earn that shit. I thought they’d take that as a challenge to their manhood. They’d either rise to the challenge, or not, but it would help them recalibrate their own self-image a bit…
It didn’t work. Indeed it had the opposite effect, and now I think I understand why. They saw it as a challenge, all right, but not to their manhood. They saw it in that awful girly way, above. That’s the mental and emotional world of the Striver, of both sexes and however-many-we’re-up-to genders. Everything filters through the question “What does this say about meeeeeee?”, even when “this” has no possible relationship to them, personally. What’s our proper military posture, vis-a-vis Iran? Whatever reflects best on meeeeeee….
Darryl Licht has come up with a 1%er-style NBC patch.
A few weeks ago there was some discussion about an NBC Unit Patch. Before that there was some discussion of a “biker-style” 3-piece patch. Leaving aside all the trouble one would cause themselves by actually wearing any sort of 3-piece patch on a cut (The Hell’s Angels AND the Mongols would, in the moment, find common cause to administer a thorough beating.) I thought a patch with a subtle logo was a good idea. This is my take on it. To all the other NBC’s – Go ahead and modify it as you see fit or go wild create your own! I used the Gemini AI thing in Google.
The lamp post imagery came up in the comments a few days ago but this was something that had been rolling around in my mind for years. I had contemplated doing a Banksy-style spray paint stencil of a lamp post as a form of guerrilla/dissident messaging. For most everyone the stencil would just be just another element of urban visual noise. But for a small number of people – on either side of the great divide – well, as the kids say: IYKYK.
I’ve said it before, but it never gets old: You guys are the best. The absolute best. If Hugo Boss ever made a motorcycle jacket…
Overgrown Hobbit brings us a link of note, and a comment:
This link from John Wilder’s blog:
The titular “we” is doing a lot of hidden heavy lifting throughout, don’t you think? Just who is that “we”, kemo sabe? Who is this Lone Ranger expecting to persuade with this piece? It is so similar to things I read in the early-90s back when all of library-land was being sold on multi-culturalism.
On the other hand, it’s evidence that the soi-disant AWFL suicidal sympathy is not a function of Whiteness, or Europeaness*, and so-on which is all the rage. The Whiteness thing is a tar baby. But European is a pagan stand-in for Christendom, the which makes me wonder if there’s a shot of truth amidst Narrative chaff.
Because then what is it, then, a function of?
I think it’s a function of prosperity. I like the phrase “caloric surplus,” because it calls to mind (to my mind, anyway), what Confucius say about the man with a full stomach: The man with an empty stomach has one problem; the man with a full stomach has a million. Confucius didn’t say “and 999,999 of those problems are self-chosen,” but I’m pretty sure that’s strongly implied. The Third World is chock full of SJWs, too. There are fewer of them both absolutely, and relative to their countries’ populations, but once you get above a certain income threshold, the very same pathologies take over.
I would refer you to a wonderful, though extremely frustrating, book titled A Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot. That the authors are, themselves, moron Liberals in the very best neo-Clintonian style is the extremely frustrating part, but that takes nothing away from the correctness of their diagnosis. You can tell they’re on the money, because the Wiki summary is short and verging on completely incoherent:
The essays defend, from liberal positions, that an important part of the political and intellectual sectors are rooted in a Third-Worldism and nationalistic mentality, if not socialist, that lead them to a constant “patriotic” victim playing that presents the Western world and capitalism as the main culprit of the poor countries woes. And, furthermore, that by holding positions of social influence aid statespeople and intellectuals allow the spread of populism and the stagnation in underdevelopment in Latin American countries.[3] The authors argue that the “idiot”, as coined by essay, does not see the Latin American problems in the state structure and believes that it is possible to achieve well-being by repeating the same process that leads to the growth of the state, the accumulation of power by a caudillo and the impoverishment of the society.
Sounds like a video game manual from 1983, doesn’t it? What our Wikitard is trying to say is that the Latin American Idiot argues for a kind of essentialism — his people are uniquely oppressed by the Yanquis, who are basically the same thing as “Capitalism,” and therefore we must redistribute all the land (except mine!) to the campesinos, same as it ever was. The book was written in 1996, when terms like “essentialism” hadn’t yet escaped containment in the ivory tower, so they don’t use that exact phrase, but that’s what they mean.
The whole book is surreal. It’s like reading some of those Old School Lefties we talked about the other day. George Orwell is the perennial example — he sees the problem so clearly, but his answer is always the same batshit “needs moar Socialism!” insanity. The main takeaway, comrades, is that this kind of thing is pervasive in the Third World. If anything, they’re much worse — you haven’t lived until you’ve had a professional colleague, who has written so passionately about the plight of the Scheduled Castes, urge you to take a much firmer hand with your domestic servants.
It seems like pretty much anyone who reaches a certain public income level starts acting like this, or is strongly tempted to start acting like this. There are lots of high-net-worth people where you’d never know it, but once you start flashing a bit of cash, for whatever reason the temptation to SJWism really starts hitting. Why, I do not know. Your thoughts?
Froissart’s Ghost writes:
I’ve been seeing a lot of commercials for my congress critter lately – every other break is an ad reminding me that Donald Trump thinks the guy is aces, so I should do what the president says and vote for him.
This raises questions.
It is April and seven months till the election, my guy is the Vichy-iest of Vichy Republicans, and the district I live in is weighted in his favor to the point he could go around throwing puppies in a woodchipper and still get seventy percent of the vote. He is congressman for life, so why is he bothering?
My first thought is it’s a form of money laundering. Ads cost twenty bucks to make, he can claim he’s actually spending millions, and the extra cash gets kicked upstairs to the boss.
It could be, but another thought occurred to me.
Trump’s first term, nobody backstabbed him harder than the republicans and it didn’t work out so well for them, so maybe this time they figure co-opting Trump is a better play than straight up shanking him. After 2028, he’s gone for good, and President Newsom is someone they can do business with, so why make waves.
It still doesn’t explain the political ads though.
It’s obvious they have Trump where they want him, he’s more than willing to bomb the stuffing out of whoever some defense contractor points to and then slurp up the praise that comes with, so why go to the trouble of gilding the lily?
I think the republicans are getting greedy.
The Washington Generals get a steady paycheck sure, but I have to think it’s nicer being the Globetrotters and maybe the Party of Lincoln guys have developed a taste for the finer things reserved to those in the majority party. They may be thinking, along with co-opting the president, they can co-opt his supporters too. After all, if a guy with a bad combover and an orange spray tan can bring in a big chunk of heretofore checked out voters, those voters might make the difference between staying in the skybox or going back to general admission.
I admit it’s a lot of theory on a little bit of evidence, but is it possible there is something there?
I have a guess, but it’s only a guess, and it’s contingent upon this assumption: That the Republican National Committee has X dollars it has to spend on candidate reelection campaigns, but no fixed allocation. You know, kinda like how your state government blows up a road or two at the end of every budget cycle — they have X dollars to spend, and if they spend any less than that it gets cut from next year’s budget, so they always make sure to have some “critical infrastructure repairs” going right at the end of budget season.
IF that’s true, then my guess it that the GOP uses asset allocations to submarine decent candidates. We saw it back in 2018, when Mitch the Bitch and the rest pulled funding from populist candidates who might’ve won. And again in 2022 and so on — I want to say that a populist Republican had a decent shot at picking up a seat, maybe even a Governorship, in someplace reliably insane like Washington, but Mitch and them pulled funding. Same way, there was that black lady in Pennsylvania who was making a good showing against “Dr. Oz,” and would’ve probably done pretty well against Strokey… but they didn’t want to do well against Strokey, and so they routed all their funding to “Dr. Oz.”
That way, they can do their standard Failure Theater. Oh, gosh, gee, we might have picked up a seat, but darn it, we just didn’t have the money to support that candidate, because we spent it all propping up whichever goober it was who was guaranteed to win anyway.
(As to the content of his ads, I figure that’s completely random. You know these fuckers will say anything to get over on the rubes. His, her, or xzhyr internal polling must say that Trump polls strong in your district, so they’re telling the candidate to pretend to be Trump’s bestie for now. The minute he gets elected, he’ll immediately go Full Vichy, like they always do).
Nipah has a question about historiography that I have no way to answer:
Does BOM even write his own tweets anymore?
Years from now, assuming they should have survived, how will historians go about sorting the canonical tweets from those that are disputed and those that should be branded as almost certainly apocryphal? Some i expect will be deemed crude forgeries, while theories will abound about how many of them were ghostwritten.
History as a professional discipline actually got its start that way — Lorenzo Valla disproving the Donation of Constantine. As to how it could possibly be done in the digital age… I have no idea.
As to the BOM’s tweets themselves… I see y’all have already been talking about this, and I weighed in a bit, and… yeah. That’s all I can really say. There’s a real Downfall vibe to it right now; he’s gibbering in the Fuhrerbunker about how he’s gonna make Iran pay, Steiner’s attack will turn everything around, and then he’s gonna build U-boats, U-boats, U-boats!
Still not as bad as Brandon, but it’s entertaining to watch the same people who kept swearing up and down that Joe Biden — an infamously stupid man back when he was compos mentis — was sharp as a tack, totally fine, etc.
HR Farmer asks:
So now that Joe Dirt is being sent as a special envoy to negotiate an end to the present unpleasantries near the Strait of Hormuz, how does that help or harm him wrt 2026? He’s apparently respected by Bullwinkle, but can he succeed at anything so long as BOM has a working internet connection?
That’s one for the ages. I’m pretty sure that BOM’s online antics don’t bother the Mullahs all that much, as they do the same thing all the time; apocalyptic rhetoric is just how business gets done over there.
My major concern is with the Bagels. They’re the ones who have to agree to a ceasefire, and they ain’t gonna (see endless examples from the past 24-48 hours). It’s use it or lose it time for Bibi, vis-a-vis the AINO military, and he knows it — gotta keep the Big Dog in the fight for as long as there’s any fight left in the Dog.
If Joe Dirt can overcome that handicap — if he can make it clear somehow that the Zionist Entity is on its own henceforth — then he’s a genius who should be awarded all the Nobel Peace Prizes the BOM should’ve gotten (and is bombing the shit out of everyone in frustration for not getting).
But yeah, Dayglow Donnie and his Internet connection can scupper anything, instantly, so who knows? Mostly we have to hope that the voters’ goldfish-like attention span holds out. Vance is doing all this in 2026; that’s all ancient history by 2028.
TWS asks:
Since data centers are eating up land, water, and power, at what point do we say, ‘enough’? When we say enough, are we going to get the Butlerian Jihad we want or are they going to just promise to treat the water after it runs through the cooling system and allow us to live under the new power lines they need?
I hope very soon, and Butlerian Jihad all the way. But I’m amused by how “climate change” isn’t a thing anymore, because you can’t run those data centers on windmills, and soon enough the Left will be screaming about how we don’t have enough massively polluting power stations, because their AI overlords need the power. Hell, just because the universe has a sense of humor, I wouldn’t at all be surprised to see the Greenies get back to global cooling, the big enviro-scare of the 1970s. We gotta build a bunch of coal plants, stat, to raise the global temperature before we all freeze to death!
BadThinker asks:
How many sheckels would it take Sev? I think you said something like 10 or 20 grand last time. Before you take the deal, can we pass around a hat to see if we can beat slappy?
In re: the possibility of my having to register as a foreign agent of Israel. Given how much shit they bankroll — and how rinky-dink some of those operations are — I do sometimes wonder how many readers I’d have to get, before some greasy guy sidled up and offered me a big bag of shekels. And I suppose that, in the interests of fairness, I must offer Slappy the same terms I offered George Soros: A million, cash, with the canceled check bearing your personal signature to be permanently displayed on the masthead.
But neither Soros nor Slappy are that stupid (alas….?). Why bother to pay me, when so many people are willing to do it for free?
But yes, if anyone ever does make the offer, I’ll put it out there to the NBCs for counter-proposals. And WOPR asked if my selling out would result in upgraded medals, ones that don’t rust. I promise you, my fellow NBCs, if I do secure some filthy lucre from this thing, I will give you not just upgraded medals, but upgrayedded medals — with two d’s, for a “double dose” of dick medals. But only after I’ve secured my yacht crewed by bikini-clad nubiles, because priorities are priorities.
Cato asks:
What was it about Jeannie Triplehorn that made her films work without making her a superstar?
I had to look her up, to be sure I was thinking of the right person, so I’m guessing that’s a big part of it. She’s pretty but not distinctive. Kinda like Saoirse Ronan, who I think came up in that same discussion, she can do everything from “relatably pretty” to “endearingly ugly” — she’s not hot enough to be a bona fide leading lady in her own right, but will never lack for work alongside an actress one level above or below her, looks-wise (for instance, Trippelhorn was in Basic Instinct with Sharon Stone, in that brief glorious moment when Sharon Stone was the hottest thing on two feet. I could also see her playing the femme fatale alongside, say, Melissa McCarthy. But I don’t think she could carry a movie herself).
Related: Does anyone know what else to call that class of girl who I call “generic hot,” for lack of a better term? I’m trying to think of examples, but that’s kinda the point — you first see her and you think “wow, she’s hot!!”… but five minutes later you can’t really remember what she looks like (other than that she was hot, but you can’t even describe just why). Maybe Baywatch hot? That show had a million actresses who were just smokin’ hot, but the ones that weren’t Pam Anderson were just…kinda… there.
I actually knew a girl like this, who had a minor acting career. She lived in the same dorm for a few semesters. And her boyfriend was the same way — another actor, Generic Handsome Man. Two of the best-looking people I’ve ever seen in the flesh, but when somebody told me that ____ had been in an episode of ER or whatever it was, I watched it and could barely recognize her.
You know what I mean? And if so, got a better term for it?
Tennessee Budd asked:
I’ve never understood why there are both an L and a G in there [LGBTWhatever]. G is gay, and L is for gay girls, so it seems redundant.
I’m not sure if that was supposed to be a Friday Question or not, but I’m treating it like one, because it’s interesting — at least, I’ve wondered the same thing, which makes it interesting to me. My guess is that it’s mostly for public health reasons. “Highly promiscuous” doesn’t begin to cover it when it comes to the poofters, because they act exactly like a straight man would act if, by some miracle, he hooked up with a woman who had a straight man’s libido. Every straight man has at least thought about propositioning his wife or girlfriend along these lines: “Hey, we’ve got ten minutes before we have to be in class, want to jump in that there broom closet and knock one out?”
Alas, female sexuality doesn’t work like that, but you just can’t keep the fags out of the broom closet (as it were). That alone would pretty much guarantee a higher incidence of venereal disease, and when you consider the, uhhh, mechanics of gay male promiscuity, public health is obviously going to become a BIG problem, real fast.
And knowing how female sexuality works, it seems obvious that the opposite would be true there. As naive and sheltered as I was, back in college in the early 1990s, even I understood the “lesbian until graduation” (LUG) concept. 90% of the time, it just meant that her libido wasn’t there yet, for any one of a million reasons ranging from biochemical to political. I also understood that LUG came with a zillion asterisks, ranging from “there’s Zima in the fridge” to “you’ve got a reputation for discretion,” most of which were pretty fun, and none of which carried public health implications (besides the really obvious, which you’d have to be a total moron to get caught up in, given that Student Health handed out condoms by the boxful).
That alone — the public health dimension — accounts for the differences in their position on the Progressive Stack, I think.
Zardoz asks:
A question for the historians here, but what do you think of [Sean]McMeekin’s work? It seems to be controversial among some circles.
McMeekin has come up in the past. His areas of Expert are out of my wheelhouse, so I’m mostly going to have to recuse myself. I read his summary of the Russian Revolution, and though it’s dubbed “revisionist” I couldn’t really see how — again, bearing in mind that I’m not Expert, his “revisionism” seemed to consist of portraying the Bolsheviks as the thugs and gangsters they were. Instead of “real Communism has never been tried!,” it’s more like “they tried it, all right, and look how it ended up.”
That’s enough to count as “revisionism” in the Academy, as the Ivory Tower is the last place on earth where you can still find unreconstructed Marxists, but to someone like myself — a reasonably informed layman — it borders on the obvious. He also has books about the Soviet war effort in WWII, which is farther outside my area of Expertise, and something about the Ottomans, about whom I am almost completely ignorant, so if anyone who knows can weigh in there, I’d appreciate it.
Dinodoxy asks:
What does the AI obsession say about the its promoters and skeptics?
I think that’s probably better reserved for a separate discussion, but in general it strikes me as yet more anti-humanism, which seems to be a very recent phenomenon. Nietzsche (and others) wrote some great invective against nihilism back in the 19th century; they saw it as threatening to destroy whatever was left of European civilization. But nihilism as they described it sounds almost quaint now: the realization that there are no enduring values.
What we have now is straight-up anti-humanism: That the human race no longer deserves to exist, if it ever did. Not that they, the Tech Bros, are going to be going extinct voluntarily, but you should… and even they, the Tech Bros, are going to transform themselves into something totally different. They seem to have this weird, insectile affect — they want to have a single consciousness, to do… something, I can’t figure it out. If they can’t eat it, fuck it, or inject it, it just doesn’t matter to them, and this is, somehow, supposed to be the attitude of a transcendent being. AI is supposed to render you irrelevant — they can get whatever they got out of you, out of the computer, faster and with no burdensome “human relations” aspect — which will free them up to.. do… something. I still can’t figure that part out, but whatever it is, you go ahead and die now; they’ll sweat the other stuff later.
Along those lines, WOPR asks:
Can demons possess AI constructs?
That’s more properly a question for the theologians; I wish Maus were still with us. But I guess I’d have to ask: What’s the difference?
AI seems to be just aces at telling people what they want to hear, because “what they want to hear” is usually pretty obvious… and usually pretty obviously bad. So much of our behavior — and, I would wager, almost all of our bad behavior — is stuff we want to do anyway; we just need someone or something to give us permission. If AI does that — and it seems to; it seems designed to — then whether or not it’s actively demonic, the net effect is the same.
Graycoat wrote:
I’ve always wondered how much of the crazy in the girls is from so many of them being on birth control from the age of 12 onwards. I’m not a doctor, and I don’t even play one on TV, but if the hormonal birth control works by essentially convincing the female body that it’s already pregnant, and actually pregnant women are known for going nutso here and there, isn’t the birth control helping drive all the girls nutso?
I’ve often thought the same thing, and I wanted to open the floor up to discussion. I’m starting to think that even the 19th Amendment won’t end up being as bad, long-term, as The Pill (although of course they feed off each other).
I think that does it, gang. Thanks for your patience. I hope everyone has a great weekend, and as always, thanks for reading.
Founding Questions 