Programming note: series on coziness in architecture, from the room scale to the city plan scale, with cross-cultural and cross-temporal studies

It's back to architecture for a little while, and the next series of posts will all be on the same overarching theme -- coziness. It will start from the small scale and work up progressively toward an entire city plan.

We'll be visited yet again by some of our favorite recurring characters here -- America and Japan exhibiting the cultural traits of the Dark Ages in Eurasia, re-examining the Dark Ages in Eurasia itself with a mind toward how they cycle with Humanist / Enlightenment cultures over the course of a 2000-year cycle, the place of architecture in American ethnogenesis (and how we invented so-called Modernism), specifically Frank Lloyd Wright pioneering just about every family of building style that makes us us (and most of it coming from ground zero of American ethnogenesis -- Chicago), the utter cluelessness of most architectural and other critics when they try to figure out American culture, and so on and so forth.

Along the way we'll explore an aspect of architecture that has received shockingly little critical attention, including in books that are devoted to formal spatial / geometric analysis. E.g., The Dynamics of Architectural Form by Rudolf Arnheim (1977), a formal critical book that I happen to have a handy copy of -- but I figure there's little discussion elsewhere, or else he would've included it in his citations and footnotes.

And that aspect is... CONCAVITY, as opposed to the far more common convexity. There is a very tiny amount about this aspect regarding interior spaces or individual elements like a column or vault, but we'll be taking a far larger view of the entire building and its grounds, and of entire neighborhood and city plans.

Everyone just assumes that when you talk about "shapes" of buildings, they have to have a convex perimeter -- where every vertex of an angle joining two walls, is pushed outward from inside the building. For example, a rectangle or pentagon or hexagon or octagon or in the limit a circle / ellipse.

We're going to see just how concave you can make a building's exterior -- where some of those corners between two walls have been pulled inward toward the center of the building. For example, a U shape, a "spokes stemming from a hub" shape, etc.

But we can't cover that topic until we start with a smaller scale, and examine how cozy Americans prefer their buildings to be, how Dark Age and defensive and fortress-like we like them, how we assume the central state is weak and nomads / bandits / feuding factions are unchecked, etc. Only then will it make sense why America pioneered concave building shapes, and how early we invented them.

And then the usual corollary -- that the Euros were at least a generation behind us (sometimes longer), copying us, and just slapping a different Bauhaus-y branding on top of our popular styles that almost always trace back to Frank Lloyd Wright.

It cannot be otherwise -- he was born in 1867 and was churning out pioneering works in the 1890s. Walter Gropius, the earliest Euro modernist, was born in 1883, and was not churning out his distinctive works until the 1920s -- a full generation delayed from the grandfather of American -- and therefore Modern -- architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright himself.

But we will give the Euros their due -- their Dark Age due, that is. And the Saharo-Arabians of the Dark Ages as well. I haven't looked too far into East Asian examples, other than to confirm that Japan is on a different timeline and is currently Dark Age like we are.

If you're sick and tired of cathedrals and chateaus, and want to see CASTLES for a change...

If you'll just puke seeing another grid layout for a city's streets, and want to see eccentric arterial meanderings and cul-de-sacs everywhere...

If you'd rather not set foot in the city to begin with, but retreat to pastoral hamlets...

We're going to see just how fucking awesome Eurasia used to be -- during the Dark Ages.

Mainly, though, the focus will be on American ethnogenesis, and the model is one of convergent evolution -- similar environments selecting for similar adaptations, not like we consciously revived the Dark Age castle complex in America. They just turned out similarly due to America having a weak central state, just like Eurasian societies did back then.

I'll put together the first post as soon as I can, but in the meantime, let this programming note cleanse your brain of whatever dIsCouRsE-sludge has been flung against it lately, and get it re-acquainted with some of the major recurring themes here, before we take off on the journey. ^_^

The truce in the battle of the sexes during peaks of social harmony, 1940s and 1990s, halfway between peaks of social chaos circa 1920, 1970, and 2020

A topic I've been exploring lately relates to the 50-year cycle that Peter Turchin uncovered in social chaos and civil breakdown in American history, with eruptions circa 1970, 1920, 1870, missing one in 1820, and 1770. On that basis he predicted another eruption circa 2020 -- boy, was he right on the money.

He does mention the opposite values of these chaotic eruptions -- low-points for civil breakdown, or in other words, peaks of social harmony. The Era of Good Feelings in the 1820s was halfway between the breakdowns of the 1770s and 1870s. The Gay Nineties were halfway between the breakdowns of the 1870s and circa 1920.

It's misleadingly called the WWII era, since it began well before the war did (certainly before America's involvement in it), but the '30s and first half of the '40s, even the late '20s, were another such period. Woody Allen dubbed the period Radio Days. Also the period in which A Christmas Story is set. Or the contempo setting of It's a Wonderful Life. Whatever we call it, it was halfway between the breakdowns of circa 1920 and 1970.

Well, we just went through another breakdown circa 2020, which leaves the halfway point between it and the previous one before that, 1970, circa 1995. And really, harmony had been on the upswing by the late '70s, lasting throughout the '80s, and peaking in the first half of the '90s.

Chaos, breakdown, disorder, riots, etc. -- far more attention-grabbing for historians. The phases of greater harmony, stability, order, and calm, tend to go unnoticed.

Because this cycle pertains to such a foundational aspect of society -- order vs. disorder -- it affects so many domains of societal life. Riots vs. calmness is an obvious one. I'm interested in surveying how broadly this cycle touches our lives.

A perennial topic of discourse is the battle of the sexes, which has reached a fever pitch in the last 5, 10, 15 years. I think we're past the worst part of it, but it's still raging.

And before focusing on the harmonious phase, it does help to start with the chaotic phase, since its symptoms are so much more intense and easy to discern.

During the most recent chaotic phase, circa the late '90s through the early 2020s, and exploding during the woketard 2010s, there are too many symptoms to list briefly. #MeToo, Slutwalk, toxic masculinity, incels, gay BFFs / fag hags, fujoshi fanfic (girl imagining herself as a male in a homoerotic male-male fantasy), redpill, Game / pickup artists, porn based on degradation or humiliation (for either sex), and on and on down the line. Guys and girls could not have inhabited more separate, and more mutually hostile social environments.

In terms of waves of feminism, this is associated with the Fourth Wave.

During the previous eruption of chaos in the late '60s and early '70s, there was the Second Wave of feminism. Mostly focused on abortion, but also women's liberation in general, free love, bra-burning, equal pay for equal work, divorce, and the birth of what's called radical feminism i.e. the bitter man-hating abolish all gender roles type. That included the SCUM Manifesto, i.e. the Society for Cutting Up Men, by the whackjob who shot Andy Warhol, Valerie Solanas -- this was before feminazis sanctified gay men as their protective cockblocking eunuchs against the forces of toxic heterosexual masculinity.

During the previous eruption of chaos before that, was the breakdown of the late 1910s and early '20s. That coincided with the First Wave of feminism, specifically the Suffragette movement. Along with the chaotic social mood generally, this movement of feminism had been growing since the turn of the 20th century, it just hit its peak circa 1920 (when the US granted women the right to vote).

You may have noticed a skipped-over wave of feminism -- the Third Wave. That term applies to the '90s and the early 2000s, during a period of relative social calm rather than upheaval, as opposed to the other three waves coinciding with civil breakdowns.

Well, Third Wave feminism doesn't really exist, and feminists admit it -- its hallmark was its lack of cohesion politically, and lack of coherence conceptually. It's more of a placeholder term for "whatever feminists were up to in the '90s". And it's premised upon women of the '80s and '90s having won so many things during the previous two waves, so what was left for the '90s?

One of the major books of the Third Wave, Susan Faludi's Backlash ('91), is more about the past than the present -- the backlash against the Second Wave after the peak of social chaos had been reached, by the late '70s and throughout the '80s and into the early '90s.

The other major book, which *was* more about the present than a backlash against the previous wave, was The Beauty Myth by Naomi Wolf (also '91). Like the Third Wave in general, its premise is how many material, legal, and other gains have already been won due to the First and Second Waves. Now with women seemingly having it all, they find themselves searching for that last little bit of perfection that cannot be allocated to them by laws or corporate policies -- beauty, namely cosmetic surgery, fashion victimhood, eating disorders, and the like. The idea was, let's try to liberate ourselves from that self-imposed / mass-mediated oppression, and focus more on our worth as people who are not paragons of beauty.

OK, if that's feminism, then there was a Third Wave of it in the '90s. But it's not a movement, not political, and not seeking to up-end society like the other three waves did. Crucially, it was not man-hating or man-blaming or seeking a redress of grievances from the offending male sex. All feminists are at least somewhat man-hating and man-blaming, but the Third Wavers were pretty tame and calm, relative to the radicals of the Second and Fourth waves on either side of them.

The most you could point to in the '90s was in its second half, after the peak of social harmony had been reached, and the pendulum began to swing once again toward chaos and breakdown -- but had only just begun to shift. These developments were the embryonic forms of Fourth Wave feminism that would rear their ugly heads for real during the woketard 2010s.

Things like The Vagina Monologues ('96) and the associated V-Day ('98) which warped Valentine's Day into a day of raising awareness about violence against women, and even the whole Girl Power phenomenon ("chicks before dicks", to counter "bros before hoes"), associated with the Spice Girls and their Millennial audience.

Also the rise of gay BFFs, gay eunuchs, fag hags, and fujoshi fanfic -- Will & Grace, Sex and the City, and by the early 2000s, the first gay kiss in primetime in an episode of Dawson's Creek (2000), and in the music video for "Beautiful" by Christina Aguilera (2002), and the bitter emo girl + messy gay BFF duo in Mean Girls (2004).

Suddenly, boys and girls were beginning to split apart, although this rift would not reach its yawning maximum until circa 2020. But it was quite a gear-shift or phase-change compared to the first half of the '90s, the '80s, and the late '70s.

So, one of the hallmarks of that harmonious phase was the relative absence of a feminist movement, especially of the man-hating and man-blaming and man-lobbying type that we usually require for something to be a true feminist movement.

The last time there was such a relative absence of feminism was the second half of the '20s (after women's suffrage was fait accompli, as well as discredited by their lobbying for the 18th Amendment to ban alcohol, which got repealed by the 21st Amendment in '33), all of the '30s, and at least the first half of the '40s.

You know the WWII era was barren of feminism when all they can point to, desperately, is the Rosie the Riveter ad campaign, or the fact that women joined the military as WACs and WAVES in their cute wool nurse's capes, to support the men in the war effort, in their typical female capacity. This was not man-hating, man-blaming, or man-lobbying for societal upheaval. So women could join the emergency war effort -- big deal, that's not radical at all, and tellingly it was not won by protests, violence, or other forms of coordinated confrontation against the power structure.

Much like the second half of the '90s, the second half of the '40s saw the very embryonic forms that would eventually become Second Wave feminism, like the 1949 publication of The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, followed some time later in '63 by Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique.

I will go into greater detail on other cultural correlates of these harmonious phases, when the battle of the sexes ground to a halt. But for now, just to get the ball rolling, this brief overview of the timeline of various waves of feminism should give you the overall picture.

I promise those details will be more exciting and relatable than the history of feminism! But we have to start somewhere uncontroversial, like organized man-hating, man-blaming, and man-lobbying. And of course, the pair movement of womanizing, woman-hating, woman-blaming, and woman-hectoring. But the male version is not an organized or academic affair, so it doesn't leave as rich of a paper trail as the female version.

And in any case, females are the choosy sex in human beings, so generally speaking, what they say goes, regarding how close or distant the sexes will be with each other. The fine-detailed surveys will also focus more on how women change or cycle over time, although I will note how men change or cycle over time in the same ways.

RIP David Lynch, who mythologized the normies of Edenic Americana, through saturated dreamy naturalism

Following up on a series of comments starting here on the topic of "cool vs. weird," and another series starting here on the topic of the 50-year cycle in social cohesion vs. chaos -- and its cultural correlates -- I explored David Lynch's role in American cultural history, on the occasion of his recent death. I'll just paste the comments here, to get the ball rolling on a new post.

* * *

RIP David Lynch, who produced most of his works during this wholesome period, and was always more cool than weird -- as were his creations.

If Twin Peaks had been weird and normie-shocking and taboo-violating and ugly or anti-aesthetic, there would never have been "Peaks mania". It was so widespread, I still vividly remember the day in 3rd or 4th grade, when a girl who sat at our little group of 4 desks pushed together, spontaneously burst out with

"Have you guys seen Twin Peaks???!??!?!??!!!! :DDDDDD"

None of us had, but her older sibling or parents were into it, and she watched along with them. We could tell how excited she was, so we believed it must be REALLY COOL, so tell us, what's it about? What makes it so cool? She couldn't really put it into words, and looked dejected after awhile, like, "Yeah, my 3rd-grade brain cannot convey the awesomeness of this show to my fellow 3rd-graders..."

But I always took that to heart, and watched it in earnest when it was shown in reruns on Bravo during the '90s or y2k (back when Bravo was like the Criterion Collection cable channel). I think I was reminded of it by some guy in our freshman dorm -- *not* a counter-cultural type, but a boarding school preppy -- was gushing over it, playing the opening theme song, etc. "You HAVE to watch it, whenever you can!"

Artsy-fartsy types loved it, too, but it was a surprise hit sensation due to its immediate appeal to normies. Nor does it depict counter-cultural types, or Bohemian urban niche environments -- exactly the opposite from someone like Woody Allen, who is primarily popular among art-y types.

It pains me to see Twin Peaks and other related works become hijacked by sub-cultures during the "weird instead of cool" phase of the cycle. Yeah, their predecessors liked it, too, but they didn't try to hijack or gatekeep it, or taint the association with it in a way that would repel normies from gushing over it as well, like their normie predecessors did back in the early '90s.

The elements of gore, violence, occult, etc. are played for sublime threat value, not for shock value or taboo-violation value. And they're balanced or heightened with elements of the beautiful -- the total babes he selected for the cast, the stunning locations, the striking rich colors and dramatic lighting, and the rest of it all.

Really his only weird / ugly / body-horror movie was Eraserhead, from '77.

The Elephant Man, from just 3 years later, was not like that at all, despite the subject being a disfigured freakshow attraction. I checked that out from the local library ALL THE TIME in kindergarten, when Blue Velvet had only just come out.

Yes, it was possible to "be into David Lynch before it was cool" back in the '80s, even for a Midwestern kindergartener who didn't even know his name. That movie was just too cool to not watch again and again and again. The things you could have imprinted on as an impressionable child in the good ol' days...

If only that girl in 3rd grade had told me that Twin Peaks was made by the same guy who made The Elephant Man, I would've been sold right away! And not had to wait until nearly 10 years later to track it down on cable -- and later, on DirectConnect.

Along with respect for taboos, goes respect for the holy and sacred and spiritual, which he incorporated into his work like few other art-school directors. And for the same reasons, his being one of the most all-American directors in the history of the medium.

Now that our cultural identity as Americans has largely matured, further down the line the dictionary definition of "Americana" will simply be David Lynch's '80s and '90s channeling of the late '50s and early '60s.

It isn't canonically American if it isn't in a David Lynch movie or TV show!

Very admirable role, to not only contribute so much primary material to American culture, but to serve as one of its main canonizers at the secondary level as well. RIP.

Delving further into Lynch's place in the "weird vs. cool" divide.

Surrealism, dreams / dreaminess, alternate dimensions, paranormal phenomena, etc. -- not weird in themselves. Not ugly, disgusting, disorienting, alienating, sacrilegious, profane, obscene, and so on.

The main way that surrealism *can* be taken in a weird direction is warped perception, hallucinations -- in the sense of trippy out-of-the-ordinary sensory perception, not just "such a thing couldn't exist here" like a person sitting on a wall or ceiling. Lynch never went with blurred vision, melting shapes, undulating lines of perspective within the spatial frame, kaleidoscopic ballets of pure shapes, and so on.

His surrealism is more of an "alternate reality" type, where the rules and nature of sensory perception remain the same as we ordinarily feel them. Perceptual naturalism.

So where does the alternate-ness come from, then? It ties into his pervasive tone of mystery, secrets, exploring the dim hidden crypts of reality. You can't immediately make sense of what you're encountering -- the space is too barren, the space seems to have no entrance and no exit, a person is sitting silent and looking at you but not saying anything, when they speak it's in a language you don't understand, or you understand that language but it's in concealed in cryptic riddles that invite you to solve and unlock their secret meaning, and so on.

Which is not to say it's off-putting or repulsive or dread-inducing -- it can go that extreme, but fundamentally it's more about cryptic meanings, which *can* be solved and understood, but not in the way you're used to determining the meaning of things.

The closest analogy to the sensation these alternate realities produce is discovering a treasure trove of communication in a language you don't speak and can't even decipher just yet, but which sparks your curiosity to decode it and learn to communicate in this unfamiliar language. You're hoping it's something mystical and BIG, not just ancient trade regulations or something boring and mundane like that...

We've all been in situations where we can't speak the language. As long as it's temporary, it's not so alienating -- before long, we'll be back to where we *do* speak the language effortlessly. And while we're in the foreign-speaking place, we can still try to figure out a pidgin to interact with this fascinating exotic world.

That's why he ties it so much into dreams -- dreams are fleeting and temporary. You'll wake up before too long, so even if you're having a nightmare, it's not a chronic condition. You're still grounded in the safe familiar waking world of your everyday environment. You're not permanently crossing over, climbing through the looking glass, whisked away by some cosmic force that may never whisk you back, etc.

Maybe you will -- maybe this is the big sleep, not just a single night's nightmare. But dreams are not inherently permanent, they are typically fleeting acute "conditions".

So, Lynchian surrealism is more about curiosity, exploring, a sense of adventure, going on a quest, solving a mystery, unlocking secrets. Fun, exciting, stimulating, inspiring -- not ugly, off-putting, demoralizing, degrading, or queering / weirding / warping. Especially not at the perceptual level, which would induce nausea and other disgust reflexes. Semantically disorienting, but never physically sea-sickening.

How about his famously "quirky" cast of characters? Isn't quirky synonymous with weird, misfit, etc? No, it just means they're not identical clones of each other, they all have their own distinct fingerprints, voices, faces, and yes personalities.

It's "all the colors of the rainbow" diversity, where each band of color is perceptually distinct, but all are equally natural examples of "color". There's not a standard color vs. marginal, misfit, outcast colors. There's no antagonism between the colors.

So I'd rather use the term "colorful characters" rather than "quirky," which can sometimes be conflated with weird, affected, etc.

That's the other thing -- colors don't strive to construct their own persona as being orange, green, etc. Their colors are just what they naturally are -- not carefully curated constructions and affectations performed for a real or imagined audience of spectators and evaluators. Lynchian "quirkiness" of characters is always unpretentious, naturalistic, and uninhibited. That's why they seem "extra" -- they're holding nothing back, concealing nothing, lacking artifice, uninhibited by anxieties about how they'll be perceived or accepted vs. rejected, etc.

I would call these personalities "highly saturated" if we're sticking with the "colorful" metaphor. They're not phony or affected colors, they just seem out of the ordinary due to how rich and saturated the pigment is -- almost realer than real -- since the artist did not dilute the pigment before applying it to the canvas.

These colorful characters are VIVID, not ostentatious or garish or caricatured or grotesque. Not campy either -- vivid.

So in this way he's emphasizing what is natural, not playing up the artificial. Celebratory naturalism, adulating naturalism -- not warping people into weird caricatured mask-wearers.

And so his characters are the opposite of affected, neurotic, performative theatre kids who curate an aura of being quirky, twee, or le sad and depressed, or whatever else. You've never met LESS neurotic characters in the history of the world's cultures...

Why are they so uninhibited, so lacking in artifice, so carefree inhabiting their distinct personalities? Cuz they aren't misfits, weirdos, etc., but belong to a community that accepts and values them simply for being members of the in-group. Like a great big single family, they are loved and appreciated unconditionally, so they are free to be themselves instead of having to construct a persona based on what will please some conditionally-loving fickle-taste audience or jury panel.

Not just among small-town folk either -- Mulholland Drive shows the same close-knit-ness of Angelenos broadly. Not to say there's never any conflict or antagonism or drama -- there's conflict within any family. Just to say that Angelenos treat each other like members of an extended family, not transactionally (and if a character does behave that way, it marks them as evil, misfit, threatening to the order, etc.).

You might even say Lynch's characters, their environment, and their social communities are Edenic -- Edenic Americana. There was temptation, conflict, etc. in the Garden of Eden, too -- Edenic doesn't imply free from threats or dangers or temptations.

But they live in a primeval, wholesome paradise, and the drama and conflict involves their loss of innocence through temptation and experience with not-so-wholesome elements (perhaps hostile invaders of their paradise, perhaps seductive antagonists who they succumb to through their own sinful free will).

This is another reason why his characters seem dialed-up -- they are more in the allegorical direction than the documentary / verite direction. They're Edenic, mythological, legendary, even though they're portrayed as inhabiting contemporary America. Mythological naturalism, legend-making naturalism.

Brief aside to say that Lynch never indulged in making anti-heroes, or glamorizing threats to the social order. The harmony and closely-knit fabric of the social order represented Edenic paradise, and whatever threatens to tear that to shreds is portrayed as an unalloyed evil, sometimes as a literal demon from a demonic dimension.

He never glorified weirdos, misfits, and anti-social types. At most, maybe gave them a seductive coolness, like leather-jacket-wearing, muscle-car-driving Frank Booth. But that was always undercut by exploring their own seedy underbelly (not just that of the wholesome small town) -- a raving nut who couldn't have fun without taking weird drugs, sexually crippled by perverse taboo-violating fetishes, deeply insecure, and ultimately pathetic, not someone anyone would want to emulate as le dark misunderstood anti-hero. Like other Lynchian characters, he's certainly colorful and vivid and memorable -- but not glorified or shown aspirationally.

You can instantly spot who misunderstands and hijacks Lynch's "quirkiness" by whether, when Lynch comes up in conversation, they chime in with "Heineken? Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!" or "A damn fine cup of coffee!"

Agent Cooper is equally colorful, vivid, and memorable -- but not the insecure, pathetic, LARP-y weirdo villain. *He* is the one that's glorified, and shown aspirationally. A modern day role model -- Lynch was a proud Eagle Scout, after all.

There was little in the way of moral ambiguity and other theatre-kid pretentiousness in the tone and themes -- there was good, and there was evil, and the creator was clearly on the side of the good guys. To choose otherwise would make the social order vulnerable to corruption and dissolution. He wanted to uphold and preserve it, and to express his gratitude at all the Edenic wonders that it provided to its dependents.

Another brief aside to emphasize that none of this morality was even crypto-Christian, let alone openly. That would have been too Olde Worlde LARP-y. If anything, it was part of New Age spirituality and morality -- how very American of him, yet again.

Ditto for the sacred music that accompanies this morality and narrative -- distinctly 20th-century American styles like jazz, R&B, blues, gospel, rock n roll, even synth-y New Age. The Twin Peaks theme song *was* included on the original definitive New Age compilation CD, Pure Moods.

I've brought this issue up before, but characters must be likeable and relatable and normie or at least normie-friendly / normie-aspiring, if their plight is to be felt by the audience. We don't care if an angry-at-everyone, self-focused, hyper-competitive brat suffers. All those taboo-violating, filthy-club-inhabiting gay weirdos from Cruising? Hard to feel sorry for them getting serial-murdered. They're already so debased, hardly human anymore.

That's why violence and other threats in Lynch's worlds are so poignant -- they're targeting the relatively innocent Edenic normies, who belong to a community, look attractive (naturally, not as in vain looks-maxxers), love others and are loved by others. THAT is a real loss.

When directors emphasize weirdos, misfits, anti-social types, competers, grade-grubbers, attention-whores, and other self-promoting types, and make them the victims, they're trying to force us into caring about people who don't care about us and would actively cut us down if given the power to. Sorry, no sympathy for the devil or his demonic minions, no matter how hamfistedly a grown-up misfit director tries to hector us into praising those who should be condemned.

Lynch allowed us to bemoan the loss of those who deserved to still be here. Moral naturalism, ethical naturalism, not moral inversionism.

Seduction, allure, glamor, temptation, and sin were other pervasive themes in his work. Ties into the beautiful, and the Edenic, and the loss of innocence, but also the mysterious, the cryptic, the puzzling -- that's another kind of attractive, enticing seduction. Irresistible, possibly to our own downfall, but an all-too-human desire.

Things that are weird, ugly, cursed, warped, unnatural, repulsive, etc. -- are *not* tempting, *not* alluring, *not* inviting us to stray from our normie path. Even when threats to the social order are shown, they have to have a kind of glamor or beauty, at least superficially and initially.

What could possibly tempt us to stray from our already beautiful Edenic paradise? -- something even more beautiful, more concentratedly beautiful, beauty in a form we haven't yet experienced hence exotic.

There is the occasional ugly revolting outsider threat (like the dumpster demon in Mulholland Drive), but those are rare. Ugliness, gore, splatter, filth, scat -- very rare in Lynch's rendering of the evil side of the universe. Also rare in his depiction of their evil effects on the good side -- no torture-porn gruesomeness done to the victims.

This places him in square opposition to the puritanical strain of American culture, especially as it arose during the late '90s and after, with torture porn that originated with David Fincher's Seven (1995), where ugly disgusting gruesome tortures are meted out to sinners in order for the punishment to fit the crime. See this earlier post.

Lynch is part of the Dark Age-oriented empathy toward sinners approach, emphasizing the seductiveness and superficial appeal of sin, understanding and trying to coax would-be sinners away from falling into temptation. As opposed to the puritanical discipline-and-punish approach of the humanist, Renaissance, Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment eras, where sinners get what they deserve, reap what you sow, etc., and where they get appropriate torturing punishments (which did not exist in the Dark Ages), witch-hunted (from the Scientific Rev era, not the Dark Ages), and so on and so forth.

There are no revenge fantasies, fan-fic, or other forms of self-aggrandizement in Lynch's work, unlike in many other favorites of the art-y crowd (like Woody Allen, to pick on him again somewhat, but he really is a good foil for Lynch).

He doesn't create these worlds in order to escape the perceived injustice of this world, into a better, just world where he comes out on top of his rivals or antagonists. Not masturbatory.

It's not escapist -- in a way it's embedding yourself even further within this reality, by not treating it in a documentary / verite way, but also not as some horrible unjust prison to escape from. It's dignifying this world, its characters, and its environment -- and even elevating them to legendary, mythological, allegorical significance. That's devoting yourself even more to this world.

So it's really not so fantastical after all, the "extra"-ness or intensity comes from imagining our world to be even more real than it really is, to be more whatever-it-is than it really is. Not "super"-natural, that has other connotations -- ultra-naturalism, maybe.

And again, those brief visits to and from alternate realities or spaces, are treated entirely naturalistically -- you visit such-and-such coordinates on a map, and presto, you're transported to the Black Lodge. It's like traveling via wormhole, in a "heavy on the science" sci-fi space story.

Just as Lynch does not denigrate the normies as enemies of the weird, he does not downplay this world as a bland flavor that should be left behind for a more fantastical razzle-dazzle escape-pod. He mythologizes the normies, as well as their worldly environment. Nobody to seek revenge against, no place to flee or escape from. Somebody to be treasured, and some place worth embedding yourself further into.

Halloween mega-post / thread: horror movies, music, video games, sublime aesthetics, vtuber recommendations, ancient Indo-European origins of trick-or-treating, etc.

Let's just get the Halloween season ball rolling by thanking Holo honey Raora for hosting a watchalong for a classic horror movie, The Thing! (The canonical 1982 version.) Irys also did a watchalong for it last year...

So does that mean that Raora is a daddy's girl like Irys? It's rare for girls to have cool tastes, usually only guys do. Ame also watched a lot of classic "guy's movies," but she's a bit on the tomboy side, whereas Irys and Raora are very girly.

So where do they get their preference for cool-guy culture? From wanting to bond with their dad! Their dad is a guy, and has guy tastes, so if they want to bond with him, they'll have to develop a taste for guy movies, guy music, and so on. Raora has fondly mentioned her dad quite a bit, more so than her mom or her sister, so I think she might be a daddy's girl -- very rare, and very appreciated! ^_^

On the Holo JP side, I'm pretty sure that the Koronator is a daddy's girl -- she's mentioned the two of them bonding over classic video games while she was growing up. Marine must be a daddy's girl -- she has fondly mentioned him quite a bit on stream (he thinks Choco is pretty, he has some rules for marrying Marine, etc.). And it sounds like Lui is closer to her dad than to her mom (who is more like Lui's brother), so I think she's a daddy's girl too. And they all have cool tastes! And they're not tomboys, so they found an interest in cool things so that they'd have something to bond with their dad over. ^_^

And those are only the ones I know about -- perhaps there are others, but I just haven't seen clips or heard them talk about their families on stream before. It seems like there are a lot more daddy's girls in Glorious Nippon than in other countries. And Japanese girls *do* have cooler tastes than girls from other countries.

Probably because their men are cooler -- descendants of samurai, ninjas, pirates, and warrior-monks (yes, Japanese Buddhist monks could marry and have children). In China and Korea, the dominant classes were scholar-bureaucrats and literally castrated eunuchs, along with the military. Girls are more likely to want to bond with their dad when he has an exciting personality, which comes from leading an exciting lifestyle (not the life of a scholar-bureaucrat).

Even among the non-warriors, Japanese men were more likely to be hunters and fishermen than the Chinese and Koreans were, because Japan is so mountainous that arable land is relatively less common, so intensive agriculture is not as common as it is in China and Korea. And fishing is just another form of hunting -- more adventurous, setting off into the unknown, having to fight against hostile natural forces.

If the fish are migratory like salmon, then fishing is more like pastoralism, and the fishermen are tending to a herd of underwater livestock, much like the Pacific Northwest Indian tribes -- which makes them a lot cooler, resembling pastoralists (risk-taking, badass, culture of honor) instead of intensive agriculturalists (boring, predictable, hardscrabble).

Mongolian girls also have cool tastes, like practicing horse-mounted archery for fun! Your daughters would be cool, too, if they looked up to their fathers as the descendants of Genghis Khan! Hehe.

I'll be posting more post-length comments in the comments section shortly, just wanted to get the ball rolling...

Imperial disintegration update, as Year of the Five Emperors continues

The all-out coordinated assault by the media sector against Biden remaining the nominee, in the wake of his abysmal debate performance, finally resolves the open question I had about why the 2024 polling and reporting was so different, compared to 2016 and '20.

Because everyone on Twitter and the rest of the media are take junkies, they cannot remember what happened five seconds ago, let alone five years ago. Not having my brain constantly plugged into the dIsCouRsE vortex, I retain my ability to see things clearly, including developments over time -- where there are clear trends or reversals, whereas the take junkies only experience a chaotic swirling flux of factoids.

In a thread from December of last year, I asked what no one else was asking -- why is the 2024 polling so uniformly pro-Trump and anti-Biden? In 2016 and '20, the propaganda said Trump was destined to lose with voters, when he won with voters both times (first time catching the DNC flat-footed and able to waltz into the White House, second time having it stolen by a very well prepared DNC). Suddenly there's an about-face -- the propaganda keeps saying how badly Trump is going to schlong Biden.

At first I speculated that the Democrats were going to let Trump have the White House rather than steal it again, since the past 3-4 years have gone so horribly for the Biden admin -- better to let Trump be the fall guy for the current stage of imperial disintegration.

But then in a comment from February of this year, I added that maybe they were only going to try to kick out Biden specifically, and then steal the election on behalf of Biden's replacement. The clue was that they kept harping on Biden's weakness, Biden's this, Biden's that -- and not the Democrats as a whole. Sounded like they just wanted to steal the election again, but on behalf of Anybody But Biden.

The same media sector that has been pumping out all of this polling propaganda has now called for Biden to step aside, in the interest of defeating Trump. So that settles it -- they plan to steal it again in November, only with someone else on the D ticket. They are still committed to taking the blame for the current stage of imperial disintegration, as long as they get to occupy the office -- nothing like jumping onto a sinking ship. But that's how overweening ambition corrupts people's minds.

They are no longer getting stinking rich off of occupying the White House, since our wealth levels continue to plummet (Central Bank money-printing shut off, interest rates jacked up, contracting rather than expanding the funny-money supply), our trade deficit soars off the charts, and our lucrative partnerships and patron-client relationships with wealthy foreigners go up in flames one month after the next. Not to mention that the purchasing power of the money they get from occupying the White House has eroded like crazy, with inflation off the charts, and global de-dollarization accelerating.

At this point, they are simply in it for the status and prestige of being on top of the pyramid, no matter how toothless its enforcement mechanisms are (couldn't get the country to wear masks or get vaxxed), and no matter how puny the material benefits are for parasitizing the White House. It's just about winning and coming out on top, rather than losing. Student government strivers on steroids.

Hyper-competitiveness is now driving the entire society right off of the cliff -- a process that has been going since the Reagan / yuppie revolution of the 1980s, and even incubating during the Me Decade of the Silent and Boomer generations during the '70s.

So my initial analysis of the post-2020 system is still correct -- we're at the Year of the Five Emperors stage of Roman disintegration, 193 AD. I first made this remark shortly after the Great Ballot Count Stoppage on election night of 2020, and followed up in a little more detail in this full post from July of '21.

The Roman Empire reached its stagnation stage under the Antonine dynasty in the mid-2nd century, much as the American Empire did under the Reagan era of 1980-2020. The chaos of the Year of the Five Emperors is spread out into maybe 4 or 5 years in our timeline, but is qualitatively the same transition to a new stage, of imperial collapse rather than mere stagnation.

There's no point in coping about the pace of collapse -- slowly, then rapidly. That's like saying when you throw a body out of an airplane, it only falls slowly at first, so there's still hope, it's not in free-fall or collapse yet. Yes it is -- it will accelerate as it plummets, and fall *really* fast later on, before crashing into the ground to its death. But it's already over the moment it's tossed out of the airplane without a parachute.

That is true for Roman decline, which began in 193, and hit the rapid free-fall sub-stage in the 230s, when one "barracks emperor" after another was assassinated and replaced from within the military.

I don't know what sector the American counterparts to the barracks emperors will be drawn from -- perhaps from the military again, one general after another replaced or assassinated. Maybe it will be finance or tech bros, who will shove each other aside in rapid succession and in a climate of leaderless chaos. The C-suite emperors. But something qualitatively like that will follow the initial stage of collapse that we have already entered as of 2020-'21.

Likewise in the American case, it doesn't matter that our collapse begins slowly and picks up speed over time -- it's a single indivisible stage, qualitatively different from the previous stage of stagnation (which itself was qualitatively different from the previous stage of expansion), and will be qualitatively different from the "recovery from rock bottom" stage that will follow it.

In the Roman case, that was the Tetrarchy under Diocletian in the late 3rd century. Who knows what individual will usher that in for America? But it will be qualitatively the same -- an impotent figure within the context of the former expanding / stagnant empire, but who has restored stability within the rump-state left after the hangover / free-fall collapse.

Diocletian not only had to rule with a junior partner, he had to concede the eastern half of the empire to the proto-Byzantines. That's a long, plunging fall from the powers and status of Marcus Aurelius of the mid-2nd century (stagnant stage) -- but a bump up from the abyss of the barracks emperors chaos of the mid-3rd century.

Just as there was no Roman renaissance with Diocletian, or any of his followers, for at least 1000 years later, there will be no American renaissance when we inevitably bounce back to a stable rump-state, after the current and coming collapse. Anyone peddling these hopes, on either side of the partisan aisle, and whether in government or outside it, and whether from an elite or wannabe position, is just another hyper-competitive opportunist trying to wring a few extra bucks out of the imperial treasury during its implosion, to pad their own personal crash-landing.

The only interesting open questions are events that don't necessarily happen during every imperial collapse -- like will one of our future leaders be slain on the battlefield during one of many hopeless and pointless attempts to shore up the contracting boundaries of its influence, a la Julian the Apostate trying to defeat the Persian empire in the Middle East and biting the big one near Baghdad.

Given how wicked and traitorous our elite class has become and promises to remain for the foreseeable future -- one can only hope so.

Read the rest of those extensive comment threads and posts for a broader survey of distractions to avoid, like any hope that we're in the French or Russian Revolution (those were pre-collapse), or Japanese sengoku (the Tokugawa shogun that followed it was *more* powerful, not less, than the shoguns that preceded sengoku), or any stage of Roman history before 193 -- like will there be an American Caesar, etc?

We already had a Caesar -- Abraham Lincoln, trailblazing leader and unifier and assassinated during the integrative civil war. Hoping for a second American Caesar in the 21st century or later, is just as hopeless as hoping for one in Rome during the Crisis of the Third Century and after.

The only worthwhile tasks now are preserving what our empire has already created, not hopelessly attempting another renaissance, and softening our landing / speeding the recovery into a minimized and relatively powerless rump-state, not hopelessly trying to cling to the plateau level that we reached in the 20th century.

Everything else is emotion-inflaming fan-fiction, and doomed overweening ambition.

Names and American ethnogenesis, from Dark Age revivals to purely New World creations

I still have plenty to cover in American architecture, but I hit on something pretty big that's worth exploring first. This is not exhaustive -- the big picture, with plenty of details, and as usual more to appear in the comments section.

I've covered names before on the blog, over 10 years ago, looking at trends over time, linking the rise of unique names with the status-striving cycle (vs. egalitarian times, when people feel compelled to give their kids the same names, so no one sticks out like a diva), and other matters.

But now we'll look at the role that given names play within the process of ethnogenesis. Strikingly, Americans began breaking from their British / European / Western / Olde Worlde roots right after landing in the New World -- *not* after the integrative civil war had wrapped up, which is when all other forms of cultural evolution take a distinctly, newly constructed American turn.

Already in the 17th-century, Puritans were giving their kids unique names by the standards of their cousins and ancestors back in Britain -- Prudence, Humility, Chastity, and other "virtue" names. Some of them have stuck, like Faith, Hope, Grace, and Felicity.

Benjamin Franklin, born in 1706, was given a name light-years ahead of its time, even in America, let alone back in Europe, where it was still distinctly Jewish -- 100 years after Franklin's birth, Benjamin Disraeli was the only Euro statesman with that name, and he was Jewish. And Franklin was not an outlier -- two other Benjamins signed the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Harrison V and Benjamin Rush.

A quick look over the other Founding Fathers (signers of the Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, or the Constitution), reveals all sorts of names that were unusual by contempo Euro standards -- Daniel (x3), Nathaniel (x2), Caesar, Titus, Abraham (x2), Josiah, Gunning, Jacob, Stephen (way ahead of its time), Richard (x5), Jared, Rufus, Arthur, etc.

As for US presidents, unusual names are already apparent with those born in the late 1700s and early 1800s, and it never stopped -- Zachary, Millard, Franklin, Abraham, Ulysses, Chester, Grover, Benjamin, Theodore, Woodrow, Warren, Calvin, Herbert, Franklin again, Dwight, Richard (more common in America by that time, but still not a typical Euro name), Gerald, Ronald, Donald, and Barack (Barry while growing up -- but even Barack, with its weak initial vowel, sounds more like a typically all-American 20th-century name like Brock, Rock, Doc, Spock, etc.)

Masculine names are far more conservative in their trends than feminine names, so the fact that this critical break with the Olde Worlde shows up in early male leaders is quite a testament to how eager we were to fashion a new identity for ourselves once we began adapting to a whole new environment in America.

Why do names defy the usual pattern of a new cultural identity being constructed only after the integrative civil war? Perhaps not as much cohesion is required to introduce new names into circulation via your own flesh-and-blood offspring. It's not like putting together Elizabethan stage plays, Viennese symphonies, or monumental architecture. Your children going to get a name no matter what it is, why not use the opportunity to make it a new one? It's cost-free and doesn't require much teamwork to make it happen, unlike the major cultural products like buildings, dramas, and paintings.

It seems like dialectal variation should behave the same way -- it costs you nothing to introduce a new sound pattern. But it does require lots of cohesion, since all the other members of your speech community must agree to the new sound pattern for it to catch on. Such cohesion only comes about from intense asabiya being born on a meta-ethnic frontier, and the outcome of an integrative civil war, when there is a strong sense of a new Us being fashioned, not just the old Us vs. Them -- but one Us vs. another Us, to determine who among the varied Us gets to set the new standard.

Names are not quite as demanding on cohesion -- not everyone has to give their kids the same new name, whereas everyone does have to pronounce the vowels in "cot" and "caught" the same, if that's to be a new sound pattern. Probably the other members of the community, when they hear a new name, think "Huh, that's a little odd-sounding... but all the other cues tell me it's a member of Team Us, so I guess that's just a new name that some of Us are giving Our kids, better make an exceptional note of it and put it on the safe-list."

Whereas if they hear a funny-sounding name, and all the other cues point to it being a member of Team Them, the strange name is just another aspect of Them-ness, and to blacklist the name as belonging to Outsiders. The other cues being grooming, clothing, subsistence mode, religion, language, totem symbols, folk customs, food traditions, music, dance, and the rest of it.

* * *

Within the general population, Americans have been even more eager to fashion a new cultural identity for themselves, separate from Olde Worlde roots (especially Euro / Western, with Ancient Saharo-Arabian being a possible exception). Right up through the end of the American Century, the top 50 names for baby girls in 1999 included purely American creations, chosen for sounding too exotic for Euro ears, like Samantha, Madison, Jessica, Alyssa, Kayla, Brianna, Grace, Destiny, Brittany, Amber, Savannah, Danielle, Brooke, and Sierra.

Quibblers will claim that Jessica comes from Shakespeare, after the character in The Merchant of Venice. But that was not a real person's name, only a character's name in a stage play. And in the play, it's the name of a Venetian, not an English speaker. It never caught on after that -- and Shakespeare in general, and that play in particular, have always been popular. It was only used on rare occasion, by offbeat parents who wanted to show how cultured or unique they were.

The true reason for Jessica's rise in popularity is its sound similarity to already popular names -- the skyrocketing Jennifer, along with recently trendy names ending in "-ica" like Veronica and Monica, and the appeal of making a feminine form of the popular male name Jesse. Jennifer and/or Jessica also spun-off the name Jenna circa the 1970s and '80s, which is *not* from Shakespeare, but does sound like an already popular name, whether Jennifer or Jessica or both. Jenna then spawned rhyme-mates McKenna / Kenna and Sienna.

There's another character in The Merchant of Venice named Nerissa, and yet that name has never become popular -- outside of the same rare offbeat parents, and the cultured individual who chose the stage name for the Hololive vtuber Nerissa Ravencroft.

To the extent that Nerissa is appealing enough to become the stage name for a major entertainment brand like Hololive, it is due to being a member of a rhyming class of names -- Melissa, Alyssa, Kissa, etc. In fact, it's a minimal mutation of Melissa, changing the initial nasal to another nasal, and the medial liquid to another liquid. Phonology, not semantics and referents, are what drive the evolution in names.

Portia, another character from the same play, caught on somewhat better than Nerissa, but it's not clear that it's due to that character, instead of the prestigious car manufacturer's name, Porsche, pronounced the same in American English. In fact, the spelling variant Porsha is another trendy American name -- and as usual, the midwits who spin their BS folk etymologies behind names, claim that it's a German word meaning "offering". Nope -- it's just a typically American-sounding name, regardless of any false cognates it may have in the world's myriad languages or its literatures or its luxury brands.

No one behaves according to what a name "means" across the zillions of false cognates it may have somewhere out there -- it's how it *sounds* that drives our behavior.

This is because names are not a private affair -- they serve as shibboleths in a social context, identifying members of Us from members of Them. If you don't recognize anyone's names, you must be dealing with Them. If their names are already known, or familiar-sounding enough, you must be dealing with Us. Shibboleths are about pronunciation and sound, not meaning or substance. I don't care what your name alludes to -- it sounds totally weird to my ears, so you must be an outsider, to be treated like one.

As America separated itself from its British, Euro, Western, and Olde Worlde roots, the names belonging to the latter groups became contaminated-sounding -- too Them, not sufficiently Us. Hence the present situation, where the top 50 baby girls names for 2023 include not only many of those from 1999 listed above -- but wait, there's more!, like Ava, Mia, Chloe, Avery, Addison (rhymed from Madison), Zoe (rhyming with Chloe), Layla (rhymed from the already popular Kayla, not descended from or alluding to its false cognate in Arabic), Brooklyn, and Maya (with lower-ranking but still popular rhyme-mates Kaia, Gaia, probably Raya, Vaya, and who knows what else next).

Gotta love the absolutely desperate cluelessness of the semantic-focused spin-meisters at thebump.com (as in, baby bump), who claim that the name Kaia has Scandinavian, Estonian, Greek, Japanese, Hawaiian, and Hebrew roots -- a post hoc rationalization for everybody! Nope -- it simply rhymes with the already popular Maya, and doesn't sound Euro, so it's suitably American.

I got a pleasant chuckle from hearing Dasha on Red Scare saying she was eager to have a baby boy so she could name him Honor, with the usual wahmen's rationalization about it being semantic -- a latter-day virtue name. But nope, it's simply a rhyming variant of the already popular Connor. She was so eager and bubbly while spinning the rationalization, though, that I hate to "decode" what was really guiding her decision -- typical male-brain always trying to analyze things, just let a girl feel her feelings, sheesh! ^_^

BTW, we can probably add McKenzie to the pure American creation list -- it's tempting to think of it as adopting a surname to a given name, but it also comes in the non-surname form of Kenzie, without the Celtic patronymic prefix "Mc / Mac". The same goes for McKenna, which comes in the non-surname form of Kenna.

Ultimately these all trace back to the earlier popular name Mikayla, which may be a purely new creation, or a novel feminine form of the male name Michael -- but in any case, where the initial sounds of "mik" are not a patronymic prefix at all. Mikayla comes in a rhyming pair with Kayla, and that supposed shortening does not involve dropping a patronymic prefix -- so we don't need to assume that process is happening either with McKenna to Kenna, or McKenzie to Kenzie.

Also, the supposed Celtic surnames are tightly constrained by phonotactics -- there are a zillion Celtic surnames that begin with Mc / Mac, and yet the three most popular ones belong to popular rhyming classes. Mikayla, Kayla, Layla, Shayla, Jayla, etc. And Kenna, Jenna, Sienna, etc. (Kenna may also be a novel feminine form of the recently popular male name Ken.) And even Kenzie is a close rhyme for the popular late-20th-C girl's name Lindsey.

The stressed vowel is produced a little higher in the mouth for Lindsey, but given the tendency for Western American dialects to lower front vowels (e.g., Valley Girls pronouncing "bitch" as "betch"), maybe they were already pronouncing Lindsey as "Lendsey", making Kenzie a perfect rhyme for it after all.

I'll only briefly reiterate Stanley Lieberson's important finding that naming trends do not follow appearances in popular culture, but rather the opposite -- some name is already climbing from obscurity into prominence, and the culture creators sense that just as well as their everyman audience does, so they choose it for their cultural work. They're two sides of the same coin, not one causing the other.

There are a few exceptions, IIRC, but in general it is pure post hoc rationalization to point to some pop culture character that came out before a name became super-popular and say, that figure made the name popular. It was already becoming popular before the character, and the character's creator was jumping on the bandwagon just as much as real-life mothers were.

Just as one example, Wikipedia, citing one of those dumdum baby name sites, claims that Kayla's popularity was due to a character by that name who debuted in 1982 on Days of Our Lives, a popular American soap opera TV show. In reality, Kayla's popularity was already shooting through the roof before 1982 -- it ranked #578 in '81, up from #594 in '80, way up from #678 in '79 and #677 in '78, up from #694 in '77, way up from #854 at the start of the '70s.

It did shoot up big-time during '82, when it ranked #132, but this is just how exponential growth and decay works -- it builds slow, then goes really fast, then slows down / tapers off, then gently declines, then crashes, then mellows out. That is a completely endogenous process, it doesn't get some external injection of oomph just before entering its steep-climb phase. And Kayla's growth was already well under way before a soap opera writer jumped on the bandwagon at the right time.

Good culture creators do not influence the everyday lives of millions of people -- they have an intuitive knack for spotting what is already in demand, and delivering it to the audience. Someone senses that the name Kayla is building steam among real-life mothers -- well, if that's what they want, then that's what they'll get, a new (fictional) person in their lives named Kayla.

* * *

That brings us to regional variation within America. As usual, the main source of cultural innovation is along the meta-ethnic frontier with the Indians, Mexicans, and somewhat the Japanese -- out West. Back-East names are more conservative, notwithstanding the Puritans' novel virtue names. Back then, Puritans *were* on the meta-ethnic frontier with Indians -- but over time, that frontier shifted further and further out West, leaving East Coasters to favor Euro-LARP-ing names more than West Coast Americans do.

Here is a data visualization from over 10 years ago, demonstrating the pattern that everyone always finds with names in America. The distinctive, new, all-American, non-Euro names are born from the Midwest to the Pacific Coast. Even within the Deep South, Louisiana or Mississippi is more likely to spawn a new popular name than Georgia or South Carolina.

Take just one salient example, the quintessentially American name Brittany. It was rhymed from the already popular Whitney, not the false cognate from the name of a region in Northwestern France, which pronounces the "a" vowel, unlike the American girl's name, which is pronounced BRIT-nee, where the "a" is silent, and where the stressed syllable is first rather than last, just like Whitney. The spelling variant Britney, as in Britney Spears, makes this clear.

At its peak of popularity, circa 1980, it was most distinctive of Utah and a broad swath of states from the Plains and Rocky Mountains region, and only somewhat distinctive of states east of the Mississippi River (Britney Spears was an outlier for being born in Mississippi).

This geographic gradient reflects the general pattern -- constructing a new identity is done by those closest to the meta-ethnic frontier, where they are being shaped into a whole new people by their conflict with the meta-ethnic nemesis, and must cohere very intensely into a new Us in order to fend off and perhaps even conquer Them.

The standard dialect in American and Canadian English is Western -- East Coast dialects sound the most harshly non-standard, whether Yankee or Confederate. And so the pattern goes with names, a linguistic element that is also strongly based on sound / phonology for determining how standard it is. It's a shibboleth.

* * *

I'll wrap up with a discussion of a very broad and in-depth discovery I made in the comments to the previous post, about America being a Dark Age culture out of sync with the Old World timeline, which left the Dark Ages behind circa 1300 -- but was part of a previous Dark Age before circa 700 BC, with Classical eras from 700 BC to 300 AD and from 1300 AD to present.

I explained this cycle by referring to the relative dominance of nomadism vs. sedentarism, with much of Eurasia being united by the Steppe as a source of nomadism, putting them all on the same timeline and cycle. Nomadic dominance leads to weak central states, and other aspects of Dark Purity cultures. Sedentary dominance leads to strong central states, and other aspects of Enlightened Perversion cultures.

But there are notable exceptions that spun off from the Eurasian landmass -- America and Japan, which remained a Dark Age / feudal culture until very recently, and arguably remains one, just like America.

(As a timely reminder of America's weak central state, look at who is sent to deal with all the anti-Zionist protests on college campuses right now -- not a federal organization like the US Army, FBI, etc., but city-level forces like the NYPD or state-level ones like the Texas National Guard, under the authority of mayors or governors, who are like regional counts, dukes, or barons from the feudal Dark Ages, not the president or any other federal official, who are like the king and central royal court from the Dark Ages. In Europe, where central states are stronger, they would send in a national-level gendarmerie like Spain's Guardia Civil for protests erupting around the nation.)

Looking over the names of American presidents, and having delved into the European Dark Ages so much recently, I can't help but be struck by three presidents having names that end in "-ald", as though they were a Frankish or Viking chieftain named Theobald or Grimwald.

This is one domain of naming trends where substance, meaning, and allusion do come into play -- not at the level of individual names, which are tightly constrained by sound patterns, but broad sources of inspiration to draw from, while obeying the all-important sound patterns. Not every name can be a totally original coinage.

In the 19th century, in the Old World itself, there was a general backlash against the centuries-long consolidation of central states and their overly rigid and dehumanizing / domesticating cultures. The Romantic movement, the Gothic novel, the Grimm brothers collecting and publishing fairytales, a Gothic revival in architecture (technically part of the civilizing phase of the cycle, but the earliest stage of it, and so feeling more thankfully barbarian in comparison to Neoclassical), Wagnerian operas about the Dark Ages and Bronze Age mythologies of Germanic peoples, and so on and so forth.

This didn't last very long in Europe as a major cultural phenomenon, not making it out of the 19th century, but it does still linger as a minority tendency. It was more of a temporary pressure relief valve for all that stultifying order and domestication that had been building up since 1300 -- not an endless new trail they were going to blaze.

Heavy metal bands that tap into Britain's Stonehenge era will always be more popular in America, a bona fide Dark Age feudal society. And as the Old World empires all bit the dust in the early 20th C, most of them fell under American vassalage (except for China), and so they adopted some degree of our very eager indulging in the Dark Age cultures of the Olde Worlde.

In names, this backlash and Dark Age revival showed up in old Germanic names making a comeback within Europe itself -- in Britain, Albert, Herbert, and other -berts, along with Robert, which never fell totally out of fashion after the Dark Ages. The first and only British prime minister to have such a neo-bert name, other than Robert, was H. H. Asquith -- Herbert Henry -- born in 1852. Among royalty, Prince Albert (husband to Queen Victoria) was born in 1819, and several generations of his male descendants were named Albert as well.

America would take that revival and make it permanent, with Herbert Hoover, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump.

Elsewhere in Europe, Engelbert made a 19th-C comeback in the eastern German-speaking lands, including places in their sphere like Slovenia. Oswald made a brief comeback in Eastern Europe as well.

But in America, not only did we elevate the popularity of Robert to all-time heights during the early-mid 20th century, and maintain other lesser ones such as Albert, Herbert, Norbert, and Gilbert, we enshrined this Dark Age suffix as a full name unto itself -- Bert / Burt. For real people like Burt Lancaster and Burt Reynolds, this may have been a nickname for Burton, but that's still a nickname that no British Burtons had used before. And in the case of Bert from Sesame Street's Bert & Ernie duo, it was spelled like the suffix and was not a shortened form of Burton / Berton / Bertram / etc.

The open-ended productive use of -bert continues outside of existing -bert names, into American novelty names in pop culture. There's icons like the Dilbert comic strip, the Q*bert video game character (a very rare American-created, rather than Japanese, arcade game from the Golden Age), the name Goobert that the most popular English vtuber, Gawr Gura (alias Gooba), gives to some of the characters she plays as in video games, as well as fellow Hololive EN vtuber Fauna naming her sourdough starter culture Doughbert. All part of her love for fantastical fairytale forest culture. Back when men had real names like Dagobert, Rigobert, and Humbert. ^_^

(The protag from Lolita, Humbert Humbert, is supposed to be stereotypically Euro, and a fish out of water in America, and yet he has a very American name -- a Dark Age Germanic -bert name. The only finishing touch to Americanize it would be shortening it to a monosyllabic nickname like Hum.)

Born around the same time as the first -bert prime minister was the first -ald, Archibald Primrose. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, two separate Harold prime ministers were born, Macmillan and Wilson. (Harold was Harald in the Dark Ages.)

Sidenote: Boris Johnson has a Dark Age name, after the greatest of the Bulgarian emperors, from the 9th century, who is responsible for Christianizing Eastern Europe, bringing literacy to them, and establishing the foundation for Slavic liturgies.

I think the -ald ending is not as productive in American English cuz it's not such a well-formed syllable, lacking an initial consonant. Maybe just -bald or -wald would work, but -bald has a false cognate with negative associations. And we're familiar enough with German toponyms that -wald sounds too much like the name of a place, not a person. IDK.

Aside from these Germanic names from the Dark Age, there are several others originally from Greek -- meaning Byzantine, not Hellenic. We're Dark Age, so must our Greek inspirations -- either Byzantine or Bronze Age.

Christopher and Stephen were only common during the Dark Ages in Europe, going into decline during the Renaissance and falling into total oblivion after then. But in the 20th C., there can be no more all-American names than Chris and Steve (the most ubiquitous Boomer name). As pointed out earlier, America was *really* early on the Stephen trend, with a signer of the Declaration of Independence being a Stephen. In fact, although he went by Grover in adulthood, the late 19th-century president Cleveland was born and raised as Stephen.

The last and only British ruler named Stephen was king during the 12th century, during their empire's integrative civil war (the Anarchy), as the English were consolidating their initial victory over their meta-ethnic nemesis (the Vikings / Danelaw, who were expelled by the Norman Conquest).

Then there are Bronze Age Greek names like Jason, that were never that popular even during Hellenic Greece. Nor was it popular during the Dark Ages. There's one Italian born in the 1400s named Giasone (del Maino), and another born in the 1500s (De Nores). Otherwise, almost all Jasons of any note are Americans born in the 1800s and after. It's so iconically American that it has been chosen as a rhyming inspiration -- for Mason, Payson, Grayson, Chayson, Kayson, Brayson, etc.

There are so many Greek names from the Classical era that we are famililar with -- Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Archimedes, Euclid, and the list goes on and on -- yet we have decided to entirely ignore them, preferring instead the monster-battling heroes of the pre-Classical era, or the heroic Christian martyrs of the Byzantine / Dark Age era. Nothing could be less appealing to American honor-culture sensibilities than "being good at math and philosophy" or "being a theater kid".

Speaking of "monster-battling" -- Bronze Age epithets like Homer's "swift-footed Achilles" fell into disfavor during the Classical era. Too concrete, and therefore animalistic or barbaric. The Romans did include a descriptive term like "august" within their 17 other elements of a full name, but that dilutes its power. And like "august," they weren't so concretely physical.

It just doesn't pack a punch like Charles the Bald, a 9th-century Carolingian emperor, whose own father was the emperor Louis the Pious. Or the 12th-century Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa / Rotbart -- Redbeard. Or the 10th-century Viking king, Harald Bluetooth. Or the 7th-century Byzantine emperor Justinian II the Slit-nosed. Or the 12th-century British king, Richard the Lionheart. Or back to Boris of the 9th-century Bulgarian Empire -- known as The Baptizer. And on and on and on...

Well, leave it to a neo-Dark Age culture like America, where our politicians are now known as Crooked Hillary Clinton, Lyin' Ted Cruz, Sleepy Joe Biden, etc. During Trump's first primary campaign, I pointed out that he descended from literal Vikings -- the clan MacLeod, whose namesake was a Viking ruler named Ljotr. At least that's the tradition, it could be a case of legitimizing one's group by means of an illustrious legendary foreign founder, much like the Rurikid dynasty in Russia claiming descent from a non-existent, legendary Viking ancestor.

Whether he has authentic Norse DNA in his veins or not, Trump surely is a Dark Age feudal leader of a weak central state, and he knows what buttons to push to resonate with its cultural values. And weak central state people love nothing more than blunt epithets. See also the once-common Italian-American practice of blunt epithets like Fat Tony, Danny No-Shoes, Jimmy Too-Short, etc. Or African-American rappers and gang members using epithets like Fat Joe, Megan Thee Stallion, etc.

Europeans haven't named leading figures "fat" since the days of Louis the Fat (also, the Fighter), a 12th-century king of the Franks. Maybe there are a few straggler examples into the 13th or 14th centuries, but once the proto-Renaissance showed up during the 1300s, it was all over for blunt epithets.

I'll bet that's a very broad phenomenon, but I don't have time to look into Dark Age Middle Eastern, South Asian, Central Asian, or Chinese cultures right now.

I'll bet Japan loved blunt and concrete epithets from about 1200 or 1300 onward, perhaps right up to the present day. The most popular vtuber in Japan, Marine, has a family name Houshou, meaning "treasure bell/chime", which seems to function more like a concrete descriptive epithet, and not a family name indicating who her parents are. Likewise, Korone is known by the epithet in place of a family name, Inugami, meaning "dog(gy)-god".

So when translating their full names into English, instead of Marine Houshou, it's Marine the Treasure-bell. And instead of Korone Inugami, it's Korone the Doggy-god, like good ol' Dark Age epithets. ^_^

Although the English Hololive girls don't have this format for their names, as members of Dark Age America and Canada, some of them do make epithets of their own, like Gura referring to herself as the Shark, Mumei as the Owl, Bae as the Rat, etc.

Without getting further into the Dark Age weeds, I'll just note that Geoffrey (later, Jeffrey) and Richard were common Dark Age Germanic names that were resurrected and made super-common in America during the 20th century.

Also, Arthurian legendary names. Not just Arthur, but Morgan, Guinevere / Jennifer (and similar-sounding names like Gwendolyn, Gwen, and Gwyneth, which most Americans pronounce as Gweneth, all of which also hint at the character Gawain), Elaine, Lynnette, Taliesin (Frank Lloyd Wright's headquarters), and perhaps not Lancelot -- but Lance! That has to be the connection. Monosyllabic shortening -- of what other possible longer name? Gotta be from Lancelot, given how much we're obsessed with Camelot. Some of these, but not all, were part of the limited 19th-century Romantic backlash in Europe, but we made them permanent, or are entirely responsible for (like Lance).

Speaking of Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Franks, that given name was confined to the Dark Ages until resurrected in America during the 19th century, including the birth of the Father of Modern and American architecture himself. Post-Dark Age Euros only used variations like Francis, Francisco, Francois, Francesco, etc. -- not Frank itself, or even the related Franklin, which was also resurrected in America during the 19th century, including the greatest president in our history, the New Deal trailblazer himself, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

The name Frank just sounds too, well, frank, to domesticated sophisticates, so they could only preserve it in the frilly-and-gay embellishment Francis, Francois, etc. In America, nothing could sound more embarrassingly prissy than the name Francis, in place of the honorable alternative Frank. I think San Francisco would sound -- and then become -- less gay if it were renamed San Franco!

I have no idea if there's a case of convergent evolution between American names and Euro Dark Age names, in the same way that our similar environments have produced similar architectural styles (closed-solid-heavy slabs and caves and fortresses). There may be something there, but I haven't looked into it yet. Maybe later, in the comments. That would require cross-cultural confirmation as well, and I really doubt I'll get into the evolution of popular name sound patterns all across Eurasia, from the Bronze Age to present.

But just based on how Frank went to Francis / Francois / etc., then back to Frank in America, there could be something to how prissy-and-sissy names sound during the 1000 years of the cycle when sedentarism is dominant over nomadism. Francis has changed the hard "k" into a sibilant "s", then added a high-front vowel (connoting things that are small, weak), and another "s" after it.

I mean, you can totally make up a barbarian name -- and yet instantly recognize it as barbarian. Conan, Thundarr, Krull, Chewbacca, etc. Only some of that is semantic association with known, existing barbarian names. Some of that has to be purely an effect of sound symbolism, e.g. the absence of high-front vowels and sibilants (at least voiceless ones like "s" and "sh" -- "z" is "zh" are OK).

Alfred, Dagobert, Harald, Arthur -- no high-front vowels, no sibilants (especially voiceless ones). Just a brief impression, without a systematic survey, but may be something there...

Aaron Bushnell: assessment, and online reactions (TikTok Zoomer carelords vs. Twitter Millennial ironycels)

First an assessment of the US Air Forceman who self-immolated in front of the Israeli embassy in DC, to protest his being called to duty to support Israel's war against the Palestinians in Gaza. But mainly, a look at the polar opposite worlds of Twitter vs. TikTok, in light of their reactions to the seismic event.

The main questions being spun by the take-havers are what should we categorize this event as (mere suicide, expression of mental illness, martyrdom, sacrifice, etc.), and what effect will it have?

We can rule out mere suicide since nobody who simply wants to end their life lights themselves on fire in a public space and announces it and performs it as a political spectacle. Most mere suicides occur so inconspicuously that they may not be detected by acquaintances of the deceased for days or weeks, and are known only to the general public through amassing them all into national-level statistics, unaware of any single individual who committed suicide and/or their motives.

Nitpicking the reasons why mere suicides never choose self-immolation is irrelevant -- it is simply an objective truth that 0% of mere suicides use this method, which means we do no lump it into that category when engaging the pattern recognition lobes of our brains (which is only a branding exercise for most take-havers, they are highly ideological and retarded).

Why do some insist it's mere suicide, a call for mental health help, etc.? Probably projection from their own depressive mindset, their impotence in political activism, etc. Surely if I'm a depressive failure, everyone else is too. Sure thing, buddy.

But analyzing take-havers' motivations is not interesting. The main point is that they're objectively wrong when downplaying the severity and gravity of the event.

Both libtards and conservatards downplay it. Sometimes for the same reasons -- projecting their own depressive symptoms onto others. Sometimes for opposing partisan reasons -- libtards wanting to prevent a further fracturing of the Democrat coalition, since they are deeply divided over Israel vs. Palestine, and conservatards wanting to prevent a loss of faith in their own efficacy, after getting upstaged by a leftist against US intervention in the Mideast, something that their media hero Tucker Carlson is usually a champion of, in favor of focusing on America's domestic crises instead.

So, it's just like Bushnell described it himself -- an extreme form of protest, destined to become a spectacle.

That raises the next question -- what will come of it? It has already become a spectacle, there's no putting that genie back in the bottle. People may not talk about it every day for the next 100 years, but the effect will last in their minds.

Just like it only took one spectacle on election night 2020 -- the Great Ballot Count Stoppage -- to irreparably damage the legitimacy and authority of the national government, whether or not the masses keep grumbling about it every day for the next 100 years. The effect remained in their minds, and therefore in their behavior -- when ordered and threatened to take an experimental drug over a potential bad flu, those who were inclined not to do so, refused. They defied federal orders because they are illegitimate after having occupied the office only after the Great Ballot Count Stoppage. Why obey those who stole their way into the White House?

Why do take-havers mistakenly believe it'll all blow over, just cuz it'll no longer be the top trending hashtag on Twitter within a few weeks or months? Again, not interesting, but for the sake of completeness -- because they're projecting their own obsessive fixation on ThE DiScOUrSe onto everyone else. Since their own attention is in constant flux according to what's trending in the media, so must everyone else's be.

But 99% of the country doesn't fixate on discourse, and is not mentally unwell enough to be take junkies, and will not flush out last week's events just cuz this week has new events. The typical normie Republican voter still remembers the Great Ballot Count Stoppage, and treats the federal government as illegitimate to this day -- regardless of a zillion other events having flushed it out of the media over the years, including right-wing media.

Parents will never forget the insane torture that was foisted on their children through the school system during the Covid hysteria. Their eagerness to move on and get back to normal does not mean that they've memory-holed those events, just cuz their Facebook feed no longer has message after message about the topic. The next time they are asked to comply with systematic insanity against their children, they are going to say HELL NO, and the power-tripping administrators and teachers union have had to back off.

How many people forgot about 9/11 after a few weeks or months? It took at least 5 years to no longer be in the foreground of daily conversation, and it's still remembered and influencing our behavior to this day, over 20 years later. People react to actual events in the real world -- not to the topics du jour of the media. If the real-world importance was big, they will file that away as worth remembering, while irrelevant events will get flushed out of their memory. Only obsessive discourse junkies fixate on the topics du jour, and forget the milestones of last month, year, and decade.

The impact will not be the same everywhere, of course. It will cause shockwaves inside of the American military, the Democrat party, and the actively pro-Palestinian / anti-Israeli governments and militaries of the Middle East -- Yemen under the Houthis, Iran, and Hezbollah and allied Shia of Southern Lebanon, not to mention within Palestine itself (but then they have a self-interest in fighting against Israel, whereas the others need a higher purpose and inspiration to join the fight against Israel).

Given how unstable Egypt has become, a spectacle like this could set off a positive feedback loop there as well, whether it spawns a wave of self-immolation protests, or rouses the Egyptian people to topple their bought-off government (since the Camp David Accords of the late 1970s), or inspires a coup within the military that results in active warfare against Israel (breaking the Camp David Accords).

The ability of Israel to lash out at the Palestinians with no consequences, was predicated on converting the Arab-Israeli wars into a domestic Israel-Palestine conflict. Before the Camp David Accords, Israel was at war with the broad Middle East (which would've also included Iran if they'd had an Islamic government, rather than the US-allied Shah). Israel got bitchslapped out of Egypt's territory by an American Republican president in the good ol' 1950s (Suez Crisis), then won a resounding victory in the '67 war, but was quickly quagmired to a stalemate during the '73 war.

Only with the US buying off Egypt and Israel together -- the major militaries involved -- could there have been a slow winding-down of the Arab-Israeli configuration of the wars, shrinking it into a narrow domestic conflict between Israel and Palestine.

When Egypt's elite can no longer refrain from intervening on behalf of Palestine, and therefore against Israel, that whole reprieve from regional war is over. Egypt has never been more unstable in that matter, so it's only a question of how soon, not whether it will happen at all. And these public spectacles of martyrdom are just the sort of thing that could accelerate the timeline within Egypt.

And it will not merely go back to the Arab-Israeli configuration of the mid-20th century -- this time a more powerful Iran will join the anti-Israeli side, and it's not out of the question that the other regional power-player, Turkey, could side against Israel (probably not heavily, though). Not to mention global powers like Russia (militarily) and China (economically), likely the Saudis and perhaps Pakistan if Israel keeps pissing everyone else off. The Saudi-Iranian alliance is already a massive change since the last time, and weighs against Israel's survival as a Zionist state.

Thus, the downplayers are also projecting their own irrelevance in this conflict. They are not members of the military, so they think no one else is in the military either -- and won't take this much more seriously than civilian bystanders will. Those who are not Democrats, assume no one else is a Democrat either -- and so, no Democrats would listen to Bushnell, since Democrats don't listen to Republicans (projecting being a Republican onto everyone else).

Some are not Americans, projecting that onto actual Americans, who will of course take this more seriously than those in countries that are not party to the Israel-Palestine conflict. And most of the downplayers are not from Yemen, Palestine, Egypt, Southern Lebanon, or Iran -- and project their own "big whoop" attitude onto the masses and elites, civilians and soldiers, of those places that are heavily involved in the conflict, assuming no positive feedback loop will get activated over there because of an act in America.

* * *

It's ironic, cuz during the Trump years including the BLM / Antifa riots of 2020, the right-wing take-havers explained that right-wing protests would not change anything, that protests only work for leftists, because leftists are in power, and protests are really an internal form of bargaining within the liberal / leftist / Establishment system, akin to a bratty child throwing a tantrum at their parents.

In other words, there could be a million Trump voters marauding through the streets, and they would get shut down instantly and overwhelmingly, for being anti-Establishment, whereas BLM and Antifa are approved and sponsored by the Establishment, so their marauding would be forgiven and maybe even their demands met. Hell, the January 6th protesters got far worse treatment, and they didn't even burn down bookstores, police offices, or murder bystanders like BLM / Antifa did.

So then, by their own admission, Bushnell's act will succeed -- he's a leftist, not a right-winger, he's in the military and thus able to petition the military, and he's an American petitioning the American government. In none of these domains was he "politically homeless" and doomed to impotence at best and cruel persecution at worst.

Unlike BLM and Antifa, though, his refusal to take anyone else out with him will make him more sympathetic to neutral / independent types, as well as right-wingers themselves.

Although it's a minor tendency, some woketards of the BLM / Antifa persuasion did try to lessen his status by saying he was an evil white military man, so don't praise him or copycat him or anything like that.

But it's not 2014-2020 anymore, so the peak of politicized violence is over (zero protests or riots after Roe v. Wade got repealed). Most on the left did not amplify woketard voices in this instance.

If anything, this event will catalyze a shift away from BLM / Antifa organizing and violence -- none of which required sacrifice from the participants, they got away with everything and were never in any danger. They were not suicide bombers, nor self-immolaters -- they were just paramilitaries of the Democrat party running riot throughout the turf they controlled. They destroyed other people's stuff, not their own. They took others' lives, not having to risk their own in the process.

There's nothing inspirational about that kind of protest, except to those consumed by seething bitter revenge fantasies. But politicized anger has run its course and is getting exhausted, not replenished, after 2020. So, few to recruit to a would-be re-run of the 2014-2020 riots, driven by vindictiveness rather than martyrdom.

The starkest sign that Bushnell's act does not belong to the same category as BLM / Antifa actions is that no one in power is parroting him, lionizing him, etc. Unlike the top-level politicians and CEOs wearing black arm-bands, taking a knee / raising a fist, plastering the relevant slogans and logos on their social media, and so on and so forth. One is confronting the powerful, the other is in cahoots with the powerful. Anyone eliding this crucial distinction is just a propagandist for the Establishment, regardless of their branding.

There's also been a huge, rapid change in the generations within the relevant age group -- 25 year-olds today, like Bushnell, are Zoomers, not Millennials. For the record, 99% of woketards, BLM rioters, and Antifa paramilitaries were Millennials, with a small Gen X vanguard in leadership, and no Zoomers (who were too busy doing high school homework during 2014-2020, to go burn down a police station or summarily execute a MAGA hat-wearer, or even launch fake rape accusations during the #MeToo hysteria).

* * *

That leads into what I thought would be a major topic of this post, but looks like will be more of a reflection in an epilogue after all. And that's the unbridgeable chasm between the two main social media sites -- Twitter and TikTok (Reddit being parasitic off of Twitter, not the other way around, and like its Twitter host, being reflexively hostile to TikTok per se, as existential nemeses).

All of the depressive, projecting, ironypoisoned, coping downplaying comes from Twitter. I was really shocked after checking TikTok, but there is nothing like that there, from either political faction. It's more sincere, serious, resisting the ironic detachment from the Twitter-verse -- confessional, emotional, staring directly into the camera, and connecting honestly with the viewer one-on-one, heart to heart.

There was a big crowd within Tumblr that was like that, and they have migrated to TikTok, or they were too young to be on Tumblr but the would-be carelord Tumblr youths of today choose TikTok to begin with, since Tumblr's dead. The insane woketard SJW types migrated to Twitter (and somewhat to Reddit).

I realize that the Twittertards project Twitter-dom onto TikTok, and assume that everyone there is an insane ranting SJW with blue hair, which has opened up a lucrative (cash or clicks) market for rage-baiting Twitter accounts like Libs of TikTok, who provide the Twitter users what they want to see from TikTok -- i.e., the minority of unhinged SJWs who are speaking their crazy Twitter-esque threads out loud rather than writing them in text format.

But just scroll through the videos within the #AaronBushnell hashtag on TikTok, and hardly anyone looks counter / sub-cultural, none are ranting at the top of their lungs, they aren't demonizing white people, saying Bushnell should not be honored cuz he was white / male / in the military, or whatever Satanic imagery the Twittertards want to be shown via Libs of TikTok. No irony poisoning in their messaging (from any side), no glib dismissive tone of voice, no smugness, no Daily Show snark and caricatured facial expressions of superiority, no cynicism -- it's just the polar opposite world from Twitter.

Mainly this is generational -- TikTok is largely Zoomers, while Twitter has always been and still is mostly Millennials (and some Gen X-ers). Bushnell himself was a Zoomer, as is the right-wing public risk-taker Kyle Rittenhouse. Millennials are too selfish and entitled to sacrifice, they've always been that way, and they'll never change. Exploring why is not relevant now, the point is descriptively, that's how they are.

Libtards trying to downplay Kyle Rittenhouse's defense of public spaces during the 2020 riots was also largely projection of their own cowardliness and selfishness, based on generational differences. Who's this high-school pipsqueak trying to defend a public space at grave risk to himself? You're just supposed to burn it down when the elites grant you immunity, like a good little Millennial brown-noser and seething revenge-fantasy-masturbator.

Branding Zoomers as nihilistic doomers is, once again, just projection by cynical Millennials who have been defeated by the world and given up.

Zoomers certainly do not hold a rosy view of their future, but that does not lead them to passivity, cynicism, and irony-coated depression. If anything, they are pissed at the certain shitstorm that the future holds for them, and they're inclined to take bigger risks to make life livable -- they have nothing to lose, unlike Millennials who grew up in relative harmony and material paradise and upward mobility (until they had to leave home).

Call it idealism, zealotry, whatever -- they are far less inclined than Millennials to just take the shit sandwich the world is handing them, and obediently gulp it down. Millennials had much to lose, and Zoomers little -- how much worse could life actually get by slapping the sandwich out of society's hand and taking a big risk to get something good to eat?

Millennials learned not to bite the hand that feeds, since that hand fed them plenty. Zoomers grew up being fed by a stingy hand, and now owe no obedience.

And no, that's not their literal parents' hand feeding them -- Zoomers' parents fed and clothed them all right. But society writ large did not. Claiming that Zoomer risk-takers are just "mad at dad" is, once again, pure projection from Millennials who were overly indulged by their wealthiest generation in world history Boomer parents, imagining that the only reason a young person would lash out at the system is cuz mom & dad didn't give them enough money to hang out at the mall on the weekend.

Venetian ethnogenesis and its role as the creative hotbed of the Italian peninsula after the fall of the Roman Empire

I've been trying to write up various posts on describing and tracing the history of striking visuals in cinematic history, having been motivated by watching the 1970s TV show The Incredible Hulk -- from what I've seen, easily the best photographed TV show ever made.

It's not as great as the movies from the same time period, since they had long production schedules and could deliberate more over composition (how things are arranged within the frame), unlike a weekly TV show. And perhaps the more talented people went to work in movies instead of TV. But I've been blown away by how vibrant the colors are, and how much contrast in brightness is shown within a single scene (i.e., dark shadows along with bright highlights).

But the iconic look of movies and TV from the second half of the '70s and into the early '80s is for another post. And so is the history of high-contrast visuals within movie history (not so surprising spoiler -- back to D.W. Griffith, in his shorts from the late 1900s, before his features and way before German Expressionism).

Then I thought how far back such a style goes in visual media that are not photography or movies. Naturally I looked into European painting -- Caravaggio, chiaroscuro lighting, that whole phenomenon. But that wasn't what I was seeing in the Hulk TV show -- Caravaggio et al. are using contrasting bright-dark tones for the purposes of rendering 3D volumes within a 2D medium like a painting.

When you see someone's face being half lit up and half in shadow, with the dividing line down the middle, it tells you their face is not flat but protrudes along that line -- that protrusion of features is like a mountain chain that is blocking the light, coming from the direction of the lit-up half, from reaching the other half, leaving it dark. Or using shading to show muscles in full 3D sculptural pseudo-reality.

I'll call this the "sculptural" use of chiaroscuro.

Certainly the classic TV shows and movies of the 1970s employ this form of chiaroscuro -- which can be used to render the 3D volume not only of individual people, but animals, buildings, particular elements of a building (like a column), and other objects that could be placed within the frame.

What makes the Hulk look so striking is not just this form of chiaroscuro, but its use at the total composition level -- breaking up the frame into regions of darker light, and brighter light, often several such regions alternating with each other as a function of distance "into" the frame, or from left-to-right across the frame. That is, not just a simple breaking-up of "left half dark, right half bright" -- even though that, too, is a welcome degree of contrast from a uniformly lit scene that leaves the aesthetic lobe of our brain unstimulated.

I'll call this the "compositional" use of chiaroscuro. Typically, works that use it also use sculptural chiaroscuro for the smaller-scale figures, buildings, etc. within the overall scene. It's taking that for granted, and applying it at a higher scale, and for purely aesthetic purposes, not necessarily for realism (if only our everyday environments always had such striking contrasts in them...).

It is most evident in exterior scenes that involve some kind of landscape -- across such a distance, some regions may be naturally brighter because there's nothing blocking the sunlight from directly striking them, while other regions may be darker due to a building, a large tree or group of trees, a patch of clouds, or some artificial obstruction put there by the movie-makers in order to give some variety to the brightness levels around the landscape.

In still photography, this compositional chiaroscuro is the defining feature of the work of the American pioneer Ansel Adams, and sure enough, that is mostly of landscapes. He used crafty technical tricks after already taking the negative, like "dodging" and "burning" to brighten or darken the targeted regions within the final print, increasing the contrast from what he'd originally shot. Artificial or not, it makes a more striking result, and that's all that matters. As a great artist, he didn't want his audience to suffer from an unstimulated brain.

I doubt any such tricks were applied in post-production for a weekly TV show like the Hulk, and even in feature films, I think it's more used for limited optical effects, not the entire look-and-feel of the movie.

* * *

Well, Caravaggio and others under his influence were not using chiaroscuro compositionally -- at most, it may have been applied to a small intimate space like a room where a half-dozen people are gathered together. And more likely, to a single individual in a portrait, for sculptural purposes.

He was working in Rome circa 1600, and even back when that city was the center of a thriving imperial culture, they did not use chiaroscuro compositionally. Roman frescos use shading to carve a 3D form out of a 2D painting on a wall, but not to create dramatic tension and variety across an entire scene or landscape.

Nor, for that matter, did the more well-funded painting style of Florence. I was really shocked to see how little the big names of the "Italian" Renaissance -- Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael -- used striking brightness changes across a composition. They're way too evenly lit, on the scenic scale, to make an impression on that lobe of our brain.

Their lesser known contemporaries in that region were scarcely any better, although some might have used it once in awhile to experiment, or because that specific patron wanted that kind of look, I don't know.

But to give credit where it's due among the Florentines, Ghirlandaio used chiaroscuro compositionally in his Adoration of the Shepherds (1485), where there are alternating levels of brightness "into" the frame (basically, bright-dark-bright-dark-bright). And across the frame, the right two-thirds is relatively darker, and the left third is brighter -- but this simple scheme has several sub-regions that stand out from that, to make it a more complex rhythm, with the top-left being dark, and the bottom-center being bright, and the distant bright landscape on the right side that is shown through a dark opening.

Partial credit for his Old Man and His Grandson (1490), where a small landscape in what is otherwise a large portrait has varying brightness levels into the distance. Most of this painting uses shading sculpturally (facial features and clothing folds), and even then it's pretty evenly lit, not like Caravaggio.

Raphael's very late Transfiguration (1520) is about as close as the Florentines got to the Venetian level of lighting and coloring. It does have alternating levels of brightness, but they're all explained within the frame -- the light emanating from Jesus, brightening those who have nothing in their way with him, and the earthen mound blocking this light and casting some people in shadow. Not much varying brightness "into" the distance of the landscape either.

Pre-Renaissance Florentines like Cimabue and Giotto also did not use chiaroscuro compositionally.

Although I may be missing the odd work or two by other Florentines, it's clear that compositional chiaroscuro was not a recurring technique for any single artist or school or period in Florence and Central Italy generally. Not the way it was for Ansel Adams.

As far as scenic-level variety in brightness, it's as if the Renaissance in Central Italy was still stuck in the Dark Ages -- or the Roman era, for that matter! Nobody had adopted it as a signature style at any point along the way.

Rather, the main compositional innovation of the Florentines was linear perspective, i.e. how to arrange things within the frame in order to simulate 3D spatial reality. Everyone already knew, and applied the knowledge, that the further away something is, the smaller it appears to our eye, and close-up things appear larger. But working out the precise mathematics of these relationships, to the point of laying out a grid or fabric of space onto the canvas, only took off during the Florentine Renaissance.

This goes along with their use of chiaroscuro primarily for sculptural purposes -- they really wanted the closest possible simulation of 3D reality within a 2D medium.

* * *

This brings us to their main rival during the Renaissance period -- Venice. Not only were they political-military rivals, they practiced opposing cultural movements. What was more important? -- autistically accurate simulation of 3D spatial reality, or the striking use of color and lighting to activate the neurons of the viewer?

This was the war between Florentine "disegno" (drawing) and Venetian "colorito" (coloring, but in the full sense of combining hue, saturation, and brightness). Here is a brief overview, which in an uncanny coincidence, I linked to in an old post nearly 10 years ago to this day, about how girls should choose multicolored patterns for their "tights as pants," if they didn't want the 3D volume of their lower half to be fully rendered by a monochrome pair.

And yet, still relevant -- although girls now wear baggy jeans or sweatpants that don't expose anything, their tops have gone skin-tight and micro-mini, like yoga pants for the torso. If she wants to not fully render the volume of her boobs and nipples, while still taking part in the crop-top and bra-less trends, she can choose one with multicolored patterns that will obscure the precise sculptural details of her figure. So far I've only seen girls with monochrome, usually white, crop-tops or "bras as tops" (similar to "tights as pants"). But if you want that funky-yet-wholesome vibe, go for a multicolored pattern!

Anyway, back to Renaissance "Italy" -- there was no national unification back then, not since the collapse of the Roman Empire. There was a patchwork of rival city-states, some under foreign imperial occupation, but one of them was actually on an expansionist path -- not reaching the level of an empire, though an expanding Great Power nevertheless, akin to Sweden in the 17th C., or Japan in the 19th and early 20th C. That would be the Republic of Venice.

Venetian ethnogenesis begins on the not-quite-so-meta-ethnic frontier between the native Italic peoples of the late Roman Empire, and the invading / migrating hordes of Germanic people during the middle of the 1st millennium. Although the Germanic people gained a foothold over almost all of Northern Italy, under the Kingdom of the Lombards, some Italic people fled to / remained in the inhospitable lagoon communities in Venice. The Lombards were coming from the west, and Venice is nestled right against the eastern coast of the peninsula, so that was the furthest frontier left between the Germanic invaders and the Italic natives.

The difference was pronounced enough -- barbarian migrants vs. more civilized and settled natives, Germanic vs. Italic languages, although the Lombards were Christianized and even Catholicized by the time they took over Northern Italy. So, not quite as intense as if there'd been a major religious difference.

At the same time, Venice had already been occupied by the Byzantine Empire, which used to control much of the Italian peninsula during the mid-1st millennium. They too were foreigners, speaking a different branch of Indo-European (Greek), and yet they were more sedentary and civilized and Mediterranean and in a sense the originators of Christianity as an institution or organized religion. So they were not so foreign to the Venetians, and the latter gladly accepted being a final outpost of the Byzantine sphere of influence, rather than get absorbed into the barbarian Germanic sphere.

This also made them opposed to the Papal States, the rump state left after the Roman Empire collapsed. They were very similar ethnically to the Venetians, but they always pushed for Roman and Papal supremacy, in a sad LARP of their imperial heyday. So, Byzantine sponsorship didn't look too bad for Venice, compared to the alternatives.

Gradually, the feeling of being encircled by the Germanic barbarian kingdoms made the Venetians cohere to such an extent, in common defense against their ethnic nemesis, that they could do some militaristic expanding of their own.

Although not referring to Venetian military expansion, the Florentine Renaissance humanist Petrarch did note how cohesive, communitarian, and solidarity-driven the Venetians were: Venice was "solidly built on marble but standing more solid on a foundation of civil concord." Not the feuding, sniping social climate that would produce literal Machiavellians, like Florence. The guild system, akin to mid-20th-century labor unions, has always been strong in Venice, back to the High Middle Ages. Nothing like getting encircled by invading barbarians, and pinned against the sea-wall, to grow a little solidarity within the community!

* * *

First Venice became more independent from their Byzantine sponsors, as that empire got long in the tooth by the turn of the 2nd millennium. But then the Venetians organized large galleys into a navy that went on to control maritime territory from the nearby Dalmatian coast (across the Adriatic Sea), as far east as Cyprus. And not long after that, they turned toward the Italian mainland and reconquered Northeastern Italy and even parts of Lombardy itself.

In their eastward expansion, they wound up fighting in the First Crusade in the Levant, where their elite must have gotten a further dose of higher asabiya from an even more intense meta-ethnic frontier -- the Seljuk Turks were Muslim, Turkic rather than Indo-European, were a mighty empire rather than a patchwork of fiefdoms like the Lombards, and were fighting to the death rather than leaving the Venetians alone in their little corner of land. At the same time, the Seljuks never came close to invading Venice, so this did not heighten their sense of needing to band together for collective self-defense like the Germanic invasion of Italy did.

The main period of Venetian expansion, beyond the nearby Dalmatian coast -- that is, from 1200 to 1500 -- seems to coincide with a lull in the growth of empires in the region, or their decline and collapse. Although the Byzantines had been past their peak for centuries by then, the Fourth Crusade circa 1200 more or less finished them off, before the nascent Ottoman Empire dealt Constantinople the coup de grace a few centuries later. And Venice took a leading part in the sacking of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade, carrying off immense wealth from their former sponsors.

With the Byzantines effectively wiped out as a Mediterranean power, the Arab invasions also long gone, the Vikings long gone, the Frankish Empire long gone, who else was there to check the expansion of Venice? France was a growing empire, but was oriented more toward unifying France, then the Hundred Years War with England, and maybe getting a piece of Northwest Italy. But they weren't in Venice. The Spaniards, ditto. In 1200, the German Empire wouldn't even begin for another 300 years, nor was the Holy Roman Empire a bona fide empire yet, as it would become under the Austrian imperial era. The various Turkic and Mongol empires were stopped in Eastern Europe, before crossing the Alps down into Venice.

And for much of this time, the Ottomans were only beginning to conquer Anatolia and Thrace, and some of that they were mired in their integrative civil war (Ottoman Interregnum). They did eventually unify and dominate the Eastern Mediterranean by the 1500s, and almost immediately the Venetian Republic went into stagnation, then decline, ultimately becoming absorbed into the Austrian Empire's sphere of influence circa 1800.

This highlights what I've said earlier about Sweden in the 17th C, Japan around the turn of the 20th C, and Alexander the Great -- these bouts of insane expansion are mainly due to the sorry state of their neighbors at the time, who are mired in civil war, imperial collapse, etc.

For Sweden, their neighbors were bogged down in the Thirty Years War, and the Reformation and wars of religion before that. After that was over, and once they met an enemy no longer mired in civil war -- Russia during the Great Northern War -- Sweden went away as a Great Power.

For Japan, the Joseon Dynasty was collapsing in Korea, and the Qing Dynasty / Empire in China was also collapsing, not to mention the moribund Euro empires that had colonial holdings in East Asia. Once they ran into an expanding empire not mired in civil war -- America during the Midcentury -- it was over for their expansion.

For Alexander, it was the collapse of the Persian Achaemenid Empire, and his "empire" did not last beyond his own death.

* * *

What did the Venetians do with their rising levels of cohesion, to match their geographic expansion, and sense that they were a special people? Why, cultural innovation! How else are they going to let themselves and others know that they're a new people, not just descendants of the Roman Empire, and not like other Italic peoples, e.g. those residing in Central or Northwest Italy (let alone the South).

In music, they pioneered the Venetian polychoral style, where groups of musicians and singers were physically separated into different wings, and accordingly developed more of a "working-against" and alternating style, when multiple voices are present. This paved the way for the Baroque era, through the pioneering German composer Heinrich Schutz, who worked in Venice.

In the dramatic arts, they invented the commedia dell'arte, where masked and sometimes dancing performers play stock character roles in performances that are partly scripted but also improvised.

In architecture, they did not innovate very much, but kept going with their Venetian take on the Gothic trend (originally from France during the Capetian expansion). Notably, they did *not* take up the Ancient Roman or Greco LARP that their Florentine and Roman contemporaries did. Oddly enough, Palladio was a Venetian, but found very little success in his home city or region -- only abroad, especially in the British Empire and its later American off-shoot, both of whom were big-time into Roman LARP-ing as a way to legitimate their nascent empires (i.e., they were not upstarts or arrivistes, but inheritors of an ancient civilization).

But more than anything else, Venice invented the use of compositional chiaroscuro. Not just "in the medium of painting" -- ancient and Medieval mosaics did not use it either. Nor did cave paintings. As a recurring stylistic feature, it was totally new! And it was the trademark of the Venetian school, which is usually known for their use of bold hues, vibrant saturation, and glowing brightness of colors.

But just about every expanding empire loves its bold, rich, vibrant colors -- and every declining and collapsing empire turns toward a pastel, drained, and grayed-out palette. Once the cohesion leaves, so does the sense of special purpose -- and with that, the will to live a vibrant cultural life. Might as well go gray. So the Venetians were not unique in using bold, vibrant, glowing colors. Unique within Italy, perhaps, due to no other expanding states there. But not unique within Europe or the Near East of that period, where multiple empires were expanding and very fond of bold vibrant colors (back to Gothic stained glass for France and England).

What did make them unique was compositional chiaroscuro, something that has been inherited into the American imperial visual style, from Ansel Adams landscapes to '70s Hollywood cinematography.

The revolutionary Giovanni Bellini already began developing this style in his St. Jerome in the Desert, and Agony in the Garden (1450s), a subject also painted by his brother-in-law Andrea Mantegna around the same time, also using chiaroscuro compositionally. It reached its height by the end of the century, in his St. Francis in Ecstasy (1480) and Holy Allegory (1490s). The striking contrast of dark-bright all around the frame is self-evident in the latter, so let's explore its subtler use in the former.

Of course there is sculptural use of chiaroscuro to render his facial features, the shape of individual boulders in the rockface, the branch posts, etc. But there are also shadows cast on the ground or other surface -- which do not render a 3D volume at all, but add to the contrast in bright vs. dark within the frame.

Then there's the variation in brightness around the landscape -- dark at the near section of the rockface, then bright on the middle of the top row of stones, before darkening somewhat again on the left / far stone along the top, more muted levels where the donkey is, dark at the next level back where there's vegetation, then brighter where the small town is, darker going up the hill, before reaching a bright reversal on the castle at the top, and even the sky has a brighter lower half and darker upper half.

Why does the brightness level change in this rhythmic way? No natural reason! Maybe there's a large building casting a huge shadow where it's dark, or a huge expanse of clouds. But it's not clearly motivated by the physics of the scene. It just looks too cool to do it any other way! Contrast, variety, stimulation, excitement, rhythm, dynamism -- that's what our brain wants, and he's giving it to us! Call it poetic, dramatic, stylistic, whatever -- but it's not coming from physics or mathematics like some other uses of shadow.

This would become a Venetian trademark after Bellini. See Giorgione's Adoration of the Shepherds (1505), Titian's Bacchus and Ariadne (1520), Bonifazio Veronese's Adoration of the Shepherds (1520s), Palma Vecchio's Diana and Callisto (1520s), Paolo Veronese's Deposition of Christ (1540s), Jacopo Bassano's Adoration of the Kings (1540s), and Tintoretto's Christ at the Sea of Galilee (1575).

Compositional chiaroscuro would also become a fixture of other imperial styles, including Spanish (El Greco's View of Toledo ca. 1600), French (most Poussin landscapes, e.g. with Orpheus and Eurydice ca. 1650), and not to mention it too many times, American (Ansel Adams). Not so much in Russian painting, aside from some Neoclassical painters of the first half of the 1800s (this shows it is not an "Eastern" thing that Venice got from being more oriented toward the Byzantine Empire than the Papal States, once upon a time). But as a thriving, enduring aesthetic phenomenon, it all began in the Venetian Renaissance, as the most cohesive people in the Italian peninsula sought a way to distinguish themselves stylistically from their feuding and Ancient LARP-ing compatriots.

This greater level of cohesion, as well as stylistic distinctiveness (at least, since the Ancient period), must be what makes Venice so much more romantic and sought-after and thought-about, compared to other places in Italy that are no slouches in the art-and-history department. Assuming you don't want to indulge in Caesar LARP-ing, Venice is the place for the most vibrant culture in the Italian peninsula after the Crisis of the Third Century. It may not even be right to call it the place for "Italian" culture, or the cultural leader of "Italy" -- it's Venetian culture, not "Italian". Most importantly, their Renaissance did not owe to economic factors like new riches, but ethnogenetic ones -- being encircled by strange barbarian invaders, as well as facing off against religious rivals from a mighty empire in the Holy Land.