While I'm busy putting together my presentation of the oldest recording of a (Para-)Mongolic language in world history by far, I thought I'd indulge in a little Halloween-time word-wandering. Previously leading up to Halloween, I discovered the Uralic (Mordvinic) origin of "vampire" ("soul-biter") and "vurkalaks" ("wolf-man thing"). I will probably write those up into posts of their own closer to Halloween, with a new Turkic variation on the "vurkolak" theme.
But for now, I'm taking a very rare tour down the history of my own language -- an etymological stay-cation. ^_^
In the process, I will overturn centuries of lazy ham-fisted "just so" stories about where these crucial words come from, what they mean, and how they're still here. As usual with my insights, no one has ever thought of them before. Only half of it is due to being smarter than them -- the other half is not taking any orthodoxy for granted, and looking at the topic with fresh eyes, from first principles. Academics are some of the most wacko people who ever made a living, and if just one Somebody pushes his idee-fixe, it becomes entrenched as the received obsession, or received clever-sillyness. You can't call it wisdom, when a wise person would rule it out as lazy or loony.
Especially in linguistics, from etymologies of particular words, to relationships between languages, there is just so much institutionalized ridiculousness. But that does mean I'll always have plenty to do, heeding my vocation as a truth-teller and secret-passageway-wanderer...
I'll get to "witch" later, for now we're starting with "warlock" since it shares its final morpheme with "hemlock", another macabre word just in time for Halloween.
The standard story is that "warlock" comes from Old English "wǣrloga", meaning "pledge-liar" (usually glossed as "oath-breaker", i.e. pagan religious officials were breaking their oath to Christianize). Here, "wǣr" comes from "pledge, covenant, agreement", and "loga" means "liar", sharing a root with Modern English "lie".
And that's precisely where we can tell this is a bullshit etymology. Old English "g" especially between vowels becomes semi-vowels "w" or "y" or dissolves entirely into its surrounding vowels. It does not remain a stop consonant, like the "k" sound at the end of "warlock". For example, "boga" becomes "bow", and that very root "loga" becomes "lie" and "liar". Conclusion: the OE ancestor of "warlock" must have had a "k" sound, which did not soften into a glide or disappear during Middle and Modern English, as opposed to "g". In OE, the "k" sound was written "c".
For brevity, I'll call Middle English "ME" and Modern English "Eng".
I do think that the first syllable of "warlock" traces back to OE "wǣr", in either of its two distinct senses -- "to watch out for" (leading to "wary", "aware", "beware"), and "true; truth". It probably combined them in a double-entendre -- a warlock was someone who watched out for his community, using his practice in a guardian or protector role, and he was someone who could perceive and speak the truth, that is as a sooth-sayer (which also comes from OE roots meaning "truth-sayer"), or a prophesy-giver. Other lesser people cannot see what events will truly unfold, as opposed to not unfolding or remaining hypothetical -- a sooth-sayer or warlock can tell you what will truly occur.
The next morpheme is OE "lāc", a once highly productive suffix used to derive nouns meaning an activity, process, or state associated with the root it attaches to. The most famous surviving word with this suffix is "wedlock", which is what I first thought of when I tried to figure out what "warlock" meant. Well, it's got some bizarre usage of "lock" in it -- and it's not the "hair" kind of lock, or the "fastening mechanism" kind of lock. What other words have a bizarre opaque suffix "lock"? I know -- "wedlock"!
In "wedlāc", the "wed" root refers to a pledge, and "lāc" is the "activity / process" suffix -- the activity that involves making a pledge. The suffix broadens the scope from the instant of pledging "I do", to the entire indefinite ceremony in which this one finite instance of pledging takes place.
Well then, "wǣrlāc" means the process or activity involving speaking the truth or watching out for things as a guardian. Not a brief finite instance of mouthing the prophesy, or the discrete instant of seeing a vision of evil-doers who are the source of problems. Rather, the broader indefinite habitual occupational activity and process of engaging in those actions. To gloss it with a noun and suffix, it means "truth-ery" and "guardian-ship".
Now all that's missing is the final vowel, since the ME reflexes end in "e", a reduced schwa-like vowel, which eventually disappeared altogether in Eng "warlock". This was the OE masculine agent noun suffix "a". This used to attach to OE "hunt" (meaning the same as in Eng), "hunta" = "hunter". This final "a" from OE regularly weakened to "e" in ME and disappeared in Eng.
So putting it all together, "wǣrlāca" = "wǣr + lāc + a" = "a man whose occupation involves sooth-saying / guardian-ship". That is precisely what a warlock was back in the OE days, before the British were Christianized. He was a religious official, interacting with the supernatural, on behalf of a congregation or audience who he was responsible for helping out.
That word regularly evolved into Eng "warlock" phonetically, unlike "wǣrloga", although the semantics were given a major shaking-up during the Christianization of Britain and the growth of the institution of the Christian church. Namely, it was demoted from a legitimate source of religious authority and practice, to an illegitimate marginalized dabbler in the dark arts, a male "witch". Even after the de-Christianization of Britain and America, "warlock" still retains its heavily Christian connotation of "boo-hiss, pagan religious official".
Rather than merely slander it semantically, the Christian officials also altered it phonetically and orthographically, to "wǣrloga" or "pledge-liar". This is a taboo deformation to rob the word of its power and legitimacy, when the practitioners and their audiences were still thriving, only partially converted to Christianity. But it's also a kind of satirical deformation, where rather than alter the sounds in any ol' deforming way, they chose a replacement that was pejorative -- "pledge-liar". Similar to referring to Ronald Reagan as "Ronnie Ray-Gun", to satirize the "Star Wars" military policy. His critics could have altered his surname in any number of ways, but they did so in a way that was semantically meaningful, just in a pejorative way.
The word "wǣrloga" is rare in the OE corpus, and restricted to Christian religious texts, such as "The Whale" (980 AD), a morality tale in favor of Christianizing rather than being seduced by all manner of demons and such, including the "wǣrloga" -- which every reader of "The Whale" understood to mean "wǣrlāca", with pejorative taboo deformation.
We can tell that "wǣrloga" was not a spoken vernacular word in OE cuz it left 0 descendants in ME or Eng, where it should have been retained as "warlow", but that word has never existed in Eng.
A scribe or two may have copied the word into ME, but it was not spoken then either, and in Eng they didn't even bother copying it in the monasteries anymore. Its rhetorical value had vanished, since pagan religious institutions themselves had vanished. Why keep heaping taboo-deforming abuse upon an official who no longer exists, and why sternly admonish his audience who also no longer exists? It was retired just like "Ronnie Ray-Gun" was, when its relevance had run out.
However, the spoken language of the common people *did* retain a reflex of "wǣrlāca" into the ME and Eng eras, even if scribes -- who were still mostly in Christian institutions -- preferred to quietly delete it and its taboo-deformed variant from their scriptoriums. It is plainly in use today as "warlock", but it erupted during the Early Modern witch trials in Scotland, where the Christian church could no longer keep the word under wraps. They needed a good, pointed word meaning "male witch", so all of a sudden the ancient word "warlock" was written -- in disgust -- once again by the scribal profession. But it had never gone away among the speech of everyday English speakers.
Although my reconstruction of "wǣrlāca" as the ancestor to "warlock" is rock-solid both phonetically and semantically, where every other proposal fails glaringly, I will buttress it further with a parallel coinage from OE. There was in fact a more dark-arts-dabbler kind of word in OE, akin to "sorcerer" -- "scīnlæcca". This is derived in exactly the same morphological way as I derived "wǣrlāca". It has a root "scīn", meaning "phantom, ghost", the activity / process suffix "lāc", and the more archaic agentive suffix "ja" (instead of "a").
The choice of "ja" caused two sound changes to the whole compound, namely "i"-umlaut, where the palatal "j" brought the back "a" to front "æ" in original "lāc", and the "c" before "j" caused it to geminate into "cc". These are both regular sound changes in OE. Because "wǣrlāca" uses "a" rather than "ja" as the agent suffix, it avoids both of those further sound changes.
The key point is that OE was already coining words for "sorcerer" using the morphological template I laid out for "wǣrlāca", including the main fixed morpheme "lāc", and only a subtly different fixed suffix "ja" vs. "a", leaving open only the 1st morpheme to denote what kind of activity the practitioner was engaged in. For "scīnlæcca", he was engaged in "phantom-ery", while the then more respectable "wǣrlāca" was engaged in "truth-ery" and "guardian-ship".
* * *
That made me think -- what other English words survive with this "lock" suffix? The received cluelessness says that "wedlock" is the only one, but I have conclusively proven that "warlock" belongs here as well. It's not counter-intuitive at all -- the "lock" in "warlock" doesn't refer to the "hair" kind of "lock" or the "fastening device" kind of "lock". How many possible usages of the suffix "lock" can there be? Parsimony requires us to assume that every example not relating to hair or fasteners is a survivor of OE activity / process suffix "lāc", and it is up to our insightfulness to discover how it is being used, what the main root is, and so on.
Well, "hemlock" is just such another example of a word ending in "lock" that has nothing to do with hair of fastening. And it's also timely as a macabre word for Halloween season. ^_^
The received cluelessness derives Eng "hemlock" from OE "hymlic", which in fact has 3 distinct plant referents -- hemlock, bryony, and convolvulus. The latter two are climbing vines, which are not deadly and not infamous for their use in ritual suicide or execution, only hemlock is.
Every reflex in ME has "o", not "i", in the 2nd syllable, so "hymlic" cannot be the right reconstruction, regardless of what species it refers to. But tellingly, some ME reflexes have the 1st syllable with "e" and some with "o/u". Clearly "hemlock" comes from the "e" form, and one or both of the others come from the "o/u" form.
Even more damningly, there's a ME reflex "hemloke", with a final "e", which cannot pop up out of nowhere for no reason at the end of OE "hymlic". There absolutely must have been a final vowel in the OE form, and it must have specifically been "a", in order to weaken into "e" during ME, and then fall out altogether by Eng "hemlock".
Therefore, the OE ancestor of "hemlock" was "hemlāca", which is the only source that regularly evolves into ME "hemloke" and Eng "hemlock". Breaking it down, "hem + lāc + a", where "a" is the weak masculine agent suffix, "lāc" is the process / activity suffix, and "hem" denotes the specific activity. What ever could "hem" refer to? Why, it's the OE root "hem" meaning "definite border", as in "to hem someone in" by drawing a border close around them, or more to the point, the hem of a garment.
Before a hem is put onto a garment, its ends are raw, unfinished, indefinite, and atelic -- extending out for who-knows-however-long. Not forever, but without a clearly defined end-point. By putting a hem on it, this vague indefinite atelic expanse is given a clean, crisp definite final end-point. It is now finished, completed, done-zo. Even more apropos, hemming a garment shortens its length, by folding over a certain amount of the end.
And so, much like the ancient Greek view of the last Fate cutting the thread of a person's life, so the ancient British viewed hemlock as the plant that, if you ingest it, shortens and finishes off the garment of your life. Good ol' gallows-humor in the Germanic languages, even back in ancient times.
What's the point of the suffix "lāc"? To broaden the scope from the instant of hemming, i.e. termination of life, into the entire ceremony or ritual in which this instantaneous act of hemming takes place, just as with "wedlock". Hemlock is "the agent involved in the activity of hemming", namely putting a hem on the ingester's life.
Much like the taboo deformation of "wǣrlāca", "hemlaca" was deformed in the scribal culture, to dilute its poisonous potency. If you say the pure name, you might as well drink the stuff straight. But deform its pronunciation a little bit, and it goes down just as harmlessly as those non-fatal (if annoying) vine species, "hymlic".
But among everyday speakers of English, "hemlaca" never went away. It evolved naturally into "hemloke" and then "hemlock", un-deformed. This makes me suspect that the taboo deformation was not just due to the poisonous nature of the plant, in which case you might think commoners also would avoid speaking its sounds purely. Probably this was related to the same Christianization effort that deformed "warlock", if hemlock's ritualistic use was tied to the region's pagan past. That would only motivate the religious transformers to taboo-deform it, while laypeople had no reason to single this word out, and kept pronouncing it according to the natural sound laws of their language as a whole.
Its most famous ingester was Socrates -- not a pagan Brit, but a pagan nonetheless. Probably the British scribes wanted to stamp out any and all associations with paganism, whether foreign or domestic, that hemlock used to carry.
By un-torturing the data, the words "warlock" and "hemlock" no longer confess to meaning "pledge-liar" or some homophone with harmless vine species. I have restored them to their fully transparent Old English glory, tripling the number of "lāc" survivors.
Why did only "wedlock" escape the scribes' alterations, and become noticed by standard etymologists for what its origins were? Well, what hatred against "wedlock" could the Christian church have had? Nah, let that one slide. But "warlock" and "hemlock"? Time to whip out the taboo-deforminator 3000... And today's clever-sillies, however atheist they may be, are just propping up the purge launched by the lexical crusaders of Dark Age Christendom.
But here amid the Gothic ruins of the blogosphere, this humble cyber-warlock in search of a congregation will continue to see and speak the truth, and guard the heritage of the language of my ancestors.
To emphasize for readers who are not familiar with historical linguistics, when I say "regular" and "sound law", this means a change that happens across the board, systematically, with clear conditions for it being triggered, other conditions when it is blocked, etc., but all at a general deterministic level.
ReplyDeleteIt's not just the final "a" of "wǣrlāca" that weakened to "e" in ME and vanished in Eng -- this happened across the board. Conversely, there was no systematic insertions of "e" at the ends of OE words that ended in a consonant, like OE "hymlic", which cannot have been the ancestor of ME "hemloke" with its final "e". That may sound like a trivial thing, but it isn't -- it decisively proves that "hymlic" is not the ancestor of "hemloke".
This approach keeps the model simple and parsimonious -- a small number of general laws -- and the fit to the data high -- covering not just an example here or there, but entire classes of examples.
The opposite approach allows the model to get as complex as the modeler wants -- invoking a law here, some other law there, contradicting itself here and there again, inserting this sound, deleting that sound, special pleading of any and all kinds for each and every word, proliferating the number of forces at work in the language. It is over-fitting the data, where every word has its own pile of laws assigned to explain it, just one great big worthless exercise in ad-hoc hand-waving.
That's how we can tell "warlock" does not come from any word with a "g" as the last consonant -- OE "g" in that position was systematically weakened into a semi-vowel or absorbed entirely by the surrounding vowels. This is not based on one contentious etymology about "warlock" -- it's an empirically documented law that swept across dozens of words between OE and ME, such as "boga" -> "bow".
How can the received cluelessness propose etymologies, which become the sole cited theories, using derivations that would flunk linguistics 101? Cuz they're wacko, if they thought of the theory themselves, or they're servile butt-kissing strivers, if they're blindly supporting the received cluelessness. That's it, nothing more to it.
Whether or not they can discover the truth, like I can, they should at least say "We don't know what the origin of this word is, but we can definitely rule out a word with "g" in it, as some theories claim". And if that leaves the question open, let it stay open. So many etymologies are totally bullshit that would flunk a weekly pop quiz that was just testing whether you were paying any attention in class, yet become entrenched by the clever-silliness of the first-mover-advantage-havers and their butt-kissing bandwagon-jumper-onners. It's really pathetic, and is not confined to the linguistics department of campus.
But since I'm not a Rube Goldberg gadget-builder, and since academia doesn't pay my bills, I have no reason to go along with their received cluelessness.
That's not to say the entire field is crazy, but at least half of it is. And that half can absolutely hijack whatever outlets exist for disseminating information, whether insightful or clueless quiz-flunking garbaggio.
That's why you make the trek up the Cliffs of Wisdom here in the ruins of the blogosphere... ^_^
I have discovered that Germanic languages resulted from a Sami-speaking population switching to an Indo-European target, whose synthesis / creole was Proto-Germanic.
ReplyDeleteI figured out the Slavs used to be Uralic speakers (East and West ones, anyway, the South Slavs never spoke Uralic), seemingly Mordvinic and Permic. I figured out that Ainu is a sister branch to Uralic (more to come).
What the hell, it was only a matter of time before I figured out that Sami used to be spoken further south than it is today -- where it's already spoken in the mid-point between the southern and northern extremes of Norway and Sweden. Circa 1000 BC, it went all the way down into continental Europe, including Denmark and Saxony and possibly further east into the Baltic shores where all sorts of "Sam" and "Sem" ethnic groups were recorded well into the 2nd millennium AD, like Samogitians, Sambians, and Semigallians (contrasted with Latgalians, showing that Semi was indeed a morpheme unto itself).
It started as usual, with a look into mythology -- but linguistic this time, as part of my focus on folkloric and fantastical creatures for Halloween. But it's gone far beyond one monster-name. Entire swaths of Germanic that look utterly bizarre have now been resolved into perfect clarity.
There are even Indo-Iranian loans into Proto-Germanic, and you can tell they passed through a Sami intermediary.
You have NO IDEA how much ad-hoc hand-waving bullshit is about to be wiped out from Germanic studies when I pull back the veil on the Sami nature of the "Germanic substrate", i.e. who they were before they created the Germanic family of languages within Indo-European.
Studying Uralic has easily been the single biggest intellectual pay-off I've ever made, other than really fundamental stuff. As for anything specific -- if you don't know Uralic, you will be utterly clueless about everything in Eurasia, from English to Ainu...
I only voted for local ballot measures and the school board.
ReplyDeleteI couldn't vote Republican because of the Iran War. Also in North Carolina, the Republican candidate wasn't into anti-trust enforcement.
I couldn't vote Democrat either.
The MAGA supporters have been unrepentant regarding the Iran War. I hope they learn their lesson.
Even on the H1B issue (software is a Democratic industry), they were unable to place restrictions on the H1B. They suspended greencard applications for H1Bs by certain companies, but the H1B numbers were not restricted (it is completely unrestricted for non-profits and universities). No plans to phase out the program.
Based upon the 2026 election results, which sectoral elites are defecting from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party?
ReplyDeleteAgriculture got screwed over by Trump's tariffs and ICE immigration raids and so they're defecting over to the Democrats, as we saw in Kansas and Nebraska and Iowa.
DeleteGen X takes over America from the Me Generation (Silents + Boomers). That's what I noticed most while scrolling through the election results tonight. There were a ton of Gen X women among the winners, but there were some men there too. And mostly Democrats ousting Republican Boomers.
ReplyDeleteVery stupid people dismiss generational analysis, while in reality political party systems or dynasties are generational, usually 40-50 years in America. The last major realignment was the neoliberal Reagan revolution of 1980, ushered in by the Me Generation, not just on the voting side but on the elected side as well. So the time is ripe for another realignment, whatever it's going to be.
The fact that Boomers were cleared out of the major political offices across the nation tonight is a testament to this generational turnover. The post-neoliberal generations are making up more and more of the electorate, and now the elected as well.
Gen X and Millennials have been included in major offices for decades, but they have not systematically wiped out the Me Generation -- until tonight. The Governor of Ohio is going to be a Gen X-er, after 28 long years of being held by a narrow 10-year cohort born between 1941 and 1952. Silents began holding the office after the 1982 election, the first of the neoliberal Reagan era.
No, I don't think the Gen X tsunami will undo neoliberalism, which would require them to be the Greatest Generation -- the ones who ushered in our New Deal utopia, as voters and as office-holders. It will simply be "whatever comes after neoliberalism".
The region that is clinging most bitterly to Republican Boomer neoliberalism is the South, which excludes Texas (which belongs to the West / Southwest). No surprise there -- they were the main geographic defector during the last realignment, switching allegiance from New Deal Dems (well, from every-era Dems) to neoliberal Republicans. They invested the most in it, as their adoptive identity, and brought with them the zeal of the converts. But even there, it's being chipped away it -- just more slowly and stubbornly than the rest of the country, which expressed their Boomer fatigue at the ballot box.
Not all Boomers got cleared out -- the good ones won, and even came back from the dead, like Sherrod Brown winning back his Senate seat in Ohio. He's a populist who voted against NAFTA during his freshman year in the House. So he's one of the good Boomers, and didn't have to be tossed out with the rest of them.
And just like the last realignment, that means the dominant party is switching, since the big winners tonight were Democrat. "Republican-led realignment" was an interesting experiment in 2016, but it was over right after it started, during 2017, and a full decade later, it has made the nation worse in every way, not realigned anything or done anything new or necessary, just flushing what remains of America down the toilet, and trying to go out in a final suicide-by-cop against Iran and Yemen.
It really is crazy how Republicans have become the school shooter party, both mentally, and behaviorally in their foreign policy. The bitter deranged school shooter wannabe governor of Ohio, who campaigned on purging America of its malls, and of its Zack Morrises and Kelly Kapowskis, in favor of neoliberal cram-school competition-ism on Indian mail-order steroids, just got wrecked by a literal cheerleader and homecoming queen.
ReplyDeleteIn a world were Democrats were not do-nothings, the Republican obstructers and school shooters would simply be lined up against a wall and shot. And for the entire neoliberal era, Dems had to acquiesce to the new era in which they were no longer the dominant party. But now that that is turning over, and Dems become a new dominant party, maybe they will actually get some real results on the dead weight burdening this country down, whether the geriatrics like Trump or the Millennial wannabes like Ramaswamy.
But that's not going to happen tomorrow. Liberal white women, like the one I voted for tonight for governor, are too chill at the moment. If they had any hysteria building up, they blew that during the woketard 2010s and 2020. They aren't crazy anymore, and most were not that crazy before 2014 either.
In fact, now it's the right-wing women who are annoying argumentative nags, trying to nag or shame you into voting for whoever's paying their bills. Not to mention a gay cabal of literal homos -- that's way more of a right-wing bloc these days. Gays still vote Dem, but an organized gay cabal of court eunuchs decided to hitch its wagon to the falling star of MAGA and the GOP, mainly its media outlets like Twitter (AKA, Fox News for Millennials).
I tuned that crap out after the 2024 election (when I voted for Jill Stein), and never looked back -- and judging from tonight, I was in a very large silent majority that simply wants the entire right wing to die and never bother the rest of the nation ever again.
Then we can start having it out about what kind of post-neoliberal nation there will be, what kind of Democrats there will be, or whatever party replaces the Democrats if that's how it goes.
ReplyDeleteOne major word of caution about the Democrats as a party, is that they have accelerated their policy of over-turning the elections of their own voters, during the primary stage. Such as against Platner during the summer, and Bernie in 2020 (when Biden was in distant 4th place heading into Super Tuesday, so the DNC forced all the vote-getting candidates to leave the race and endorse the voter-rejected Biden on the way out the door).
So that's on the medium-term horizon. But in the short-term, all you can do is send a signal by voting straight-ticket Democrat, to create public consciousness that everyone hates what is going on, and wants anyone responsible to fry for it.
Shattering the conformity effect is necessary for societal change, and just as in 2016 when nobody suspected America was sick of neoliberalism and wanted something drastically different -- everybody was caught off-guard tonight as well, because the conformity effect was so thoroughly shattered. Conservatards tonight are like libtards on election night 2016 (always doing things 10 years too late).
In 2016, libs were shocked that wide swaths of the Obama coalition decided to unplug from it, leading to all sorts of "first time since 1988 or 1932" events. Well, we had at least one of those tonight -- Kansas has elected a Democrat Senator, for the first time since 1932. And Ohio, which was a double-digit Trump state, just gave his hand-picked candidate for governor the ol' heave-ho.
Something is in the air, we just can't tell precisely what it is yet...
Texas Governors became Me Gen starting in '82 as well, except for a non-consecutive 2nd term of their last Greatest Gen governor (from '87-91). For the past 32 long years, Texas has been run into the ground by a narrow 10-year cohort of Boomers born between 1946 and 1957, beginning with George W. Bush.
ReplyDeleteNow they will be liberated by a Gen X liberal white (Hispanic) woman.
Read 'em and weep, Me Generation...
I saw a bit of Vance's response to the rout, and it was all "polls say..." and "polls indicate..." He had zero intuitive understanding as to why GOP got the boot. It was completely lacking in sincerity and heartfelt emotion. The MAGAtards also think he's going to win in 2028.
ReplyDeleteI used to read MPC, and they were interesting in the runup to the 2016 election. Eventually, it became clear that their litmus test was loyalty to Trump. They didn't criticize him for covid vaccines or for the Iran war. I stopped reading their political stuff as they became pretty boring.
I read a MAGAtard who just before the election said that the Iran War cost is about the same as a Medicare fraud rounding error and that Trump would resume and finish the Iran war as soon as the midterm election was over.
They really thought they would win the election and that the pollsters were wrong, as in 2016. They really feel that as long as Trump engages in a bit of performative immigration crackdown (and it is completely performative), that it justifies everything else.
It was clear after Trump bombed and put boots on the ground in Syria, April 2017, only a few months into his presidencey, that the supposed Republican-led realignment was going to fail and make everything worse. That's when I abandoned MAGA, after being a diehard during the election season.
ReplyDeleteI'd only voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 on anti-war and anti-globalization grounds, ignored every election after that since it was just the same ol' Boomer neoliberal bullshit, then fell out of my seat in 2015 when Trump began trashing the entire Reagan era, including Saint Ronnie himself. But, not being a Republican, I had no allegiance to him or the party -- only if they delivered. They didn't, so it was over. By 2024 I was back to voting Green again.
I also learned about the dynasty / party system turnover model, what phases it goes through, and so on, during Trump: Season One. The party that initiates a whole new system eventually stagnates, and there's a last-ditch effort to criticize it and reform it from within the very party that started it and has invested the most in it. This is the "disjunctive" phase. But it fails to fundamentally alter the system that it built, so it gets replaced by a new party system where the other party takes over, starting the cycle all over again.
Turns out, Trump was a classic disjunctive phase president, and anyone hoping to fundamentally alter anything that became the norm once Reagan took office, via the GOP that started it all, was either crazy, delusional, or lying in order to keep you on the GOP plantation (assuming you were already on it, which I was not).
So, there will be zero revolutionary politics from the right in America going forward. They are the stagnant dominant party since Reagan, so they require replacing with a new dominant party from the other side, to usher in anything new. Again, what that new thing is, remains to be seen. But if it's new, it will come from the left, and from a new generation who did not construct the current party system back during the last realignment (neolib yuppies in 1980).
Just look at Denmark -- they also ushered in the neolib era via the right-wing, and as of a few years ago, their left has realigned and is doing "immigration restriction / deportation, from a populist left-wing principle". And their leader is one of the growing cohort of Gen X baddies on the left, Mette Frederiksen. She's a realigner, ushering in the post-neolib era of Denmark.
Remember her when girl-haters (male or female) cry about how liberal white women are the downfall of Western Civ, when it was really Ronnie Ray-gun, George W. Bush, etc., who opened the floodgates to cheap foreign labor in America. And it is now white liberal women like Frederiksen who are closing those gates back up, just doing so from populist left-wing perspectives, rather than performative anti-immigrant hatred.
Sooner rather than later, America will welcome its own Mette Frederiksen... ^_^
On the timing of generational turnover in state governors, there were only small single digits during the late 2000s and early 2010s, then it began doubling roughly every 4 years during the late 2010s. After inauguration in 2027, there will be 18 governors born after 1964, up from 11 in 2023. This is the largest spike in absolute numbers, and still in the range of "roughly doubling" every 4 years.
ReplyDeleteIt has been going on so long in some states that one Gen X-er is replacing another, as in Michigan. It looks like 2018 was the initial burst, with Newsome, Whitmer, and DeSantis winning in the same year. By now, it includes Millennials too, and it's twice the size of the burst in 2018.
Obviously generational turnover only moves steadily in one direction, not revivals or reversals, so by 2031 a majority of state governors will be born after 1964.
I'm sure the Senate composition shows the same overall trend over time.
The entire cohort of citizens and politicians who constructed the existing party system, back in 1980, are not just gradually aging out and younger ones gradually aging in. If that were true, there would be a steady linear trend over the years, with no identifiable moments of rapid change. Instead, as I said about the governors of Ohio and Texas (and Maine and Michigan and everywhere else), there are periods of initial rapid change, which then coast steadily for decades, despite the governing cohort remaining within a 10-year birth year window.
The governing elite did not see its birth year advance 1 year with every calendar year -- there was an entrenched cohort who seized control for many decades, refusing to concede it to their birth-year successors.
Then, every 40-50 years, it undergoes another moment of rapid change. That great replacement has already begun, only somewhat detectable circa 2020, but by now obvious to anyone with their eyes open. Boomers who have been entrenched for decades are getting cleared out en masse by Gen X and Millennials, who struggled to even get their foot in the door during most of the 2010s or earlier.
As there is a rapid change in the generational make-up of the elite, there will necessarily be a rapid change in its goals, purposes, and so on. If there had been a seamless gradual progression of birth years among the elite, getting younger by 1 year with each calendar year, there would be not stark generational divide in interests, goals, problems, and so on. Each year the previous elite would pass the torch to the next elite, with only a 1 year age difference, on and on down the line.
But when a 10-year cohort seizes control for an entire generation, actively blocking those just a few years younger than them from taking over the torch, pressure builds up inside the entire system, until there is too much of the citizenry and aspiring rulers who have been locked out by the "refuses to leave" cohort. By refusing to share power, the entrenched elite creates a sharp contrast between the power-holder-onners and the locked-out-of-the-roomers.
And yet, biology dictates that old people will die every year and be replaced by young people, so that there arises a massive outta-whack mismatch between the typical demographic profile of the country, and who its elites are. I don't mean racial, all of this operates in a 100% homogeneous society as well. And racial conflicts would be minimized if power were handed over incrementally rather than held onto for entire generations, since the racial differences are minimal between any 2 calendar years -- but can be stark between 20 or 40 calendar years.
And that's when the entrenched system starts to buckle under the pressure, and the shut-out majority begins to storm the capital and take it over, usually without much fanfare. But once they get in there, they enact a sweeping set of changes to the long-stagnant system, based on those pent-up problems that the entrenched cohort refused to improve, since they did not share those problems, since they were the power-wielders rather than those locked out of the system.
"B-b-but, it's not a true fundamental change if it's not what I want." Sorry, you're just bitter that you aren't getting what you want. That doesn't affect the descriptive factual reality, which is massive generational turnover, and concomitant systemic change in the purposes, goals, etc., that the system is built around.
ReplyDeleteA Martian scientist looking at the 1980 Reagan revolution doesn't care if the system that replaced the New Deal was not the system that a wannabe revolutionary from various 1970s movements wanted to replace the New Deal with. It was replaced, it was neoliberalism, fundamentally different, and that was a huge generational rupture.
The same Martian scientist will observe this current turnover in the same way -- factually, descriptively, something fundamentally new is coming. Whether this person or that person thinks it's better, worse, or whatever, is irrelevant. Did the system fundamentally change? Yes. Was it accompanied by, even driven by, rapid generational turnover? Yes again. Case closed, another classic example of party system / dynastic realignment.
And so I no longer think Dems are just gonna wimp out, eat shit, and mimic everything the dominant party (Reaganite GOP) does. They did not do that initially -- they ran a New Deal candidate in 1980 (incumbent Carter), who lost. In '84 they ran his New Deal VP, Mondale, who lost again. In '88 they ran another New Deal-esque Ellis Islander, who lost yet again.
ReplyDeleteOnly by chasing after Reaganite neolib trailblazing, did the Dems succeed in winning the presidency again, with a Southerner who appealed to the South, which had recently defected from Dems to GOP, and did so on neolib grounds like free trade, gutting the welfare state, and so on. Clinton was the first accommodating president from the minority party of its era, after shedding the delusion that it was still the dominant party and that the party system had not changed from the New Deal. They accepted the New Deal was over by '92, and Dems have been accommodating the Reaganite project ever since...
Well, as long as they also overlapped in the generational make-up of the constructers of the Reaganite system, namely being the Me Generation of Silents + Boomers.
Gen X Democrats have very little invested in Reaganism, and Millennials even less, Zoomers nothing at all invested in it. So why would they just passively go along with whatever the Reaganite GOP zombies are doing? Only if they themselves also benefitted from it -- but they don't.
If the minority part only ever accommodated the dominant party, as a grudging passive junior partner who felt it was better than nothing, there would never be sweeping changes in who was dominant or minority, whose project was being preserved vs. being dismantled. Once the cohort of elites rapidly shifts generationally, very few of them have any interest in maintaining the status quo -- and indeed, every interest to dismantle it and build their own project, based on all those pent-up needs that had gone unaddressed during the phase of entrenched elites.
Frederiksen's realigning Socialist party in Denmark is proof -- she and her new cohort of leftists are not passively going along with right-wing open borders policy in order to benefit labor-intensive employers, just from a left-wing perspective. That was the era of the 1990s, 2000s, and the 2010s -- justify the status quo from the other direction, to really strengthen it. Diversity is our strength, we love ethnic food, etc etc etc. -- as long as it was left-wing and justified the neolib system, that was their platform. Left-wing Boomers benefitted from that system of cheap foreign labor just as much as right-wing Boomers did, so why would they alter it?
ReplyDeleteBut Gen X and Millennial left-wingers didn't benefit from open borders, since the employer class is another domain where cohorts remain entrenched for generations rather than incrementally transfer power and wealth to prevent stark conflicts of interest across birth cohorts. CEOs in the 2000s and 2010s were still overwhelmingly Boomers, as they were in the 1990s and '80s. Gen X, even if they were aspiring elites, were not being dealt in to the "get rich by opening the borders" project, which Boomers guarded for themselves.
OK, fine then -- when Gen X and Millennials take over, there goes the Boomer-only project. Now the new generations are doing something new, that benefits them, and the only difference between left and right is the principles they invoke to justify it.
Leftist Gen X-ers in Denmark invoke the solvency of the state in order to provide its welfare goodies to all citizens, as the reason why the population size cannot explode to infinity overnight, and whose benefits only go to the immigrants themselves and the greedy tiny elite of Boomers who employ them at sub-standard rates.
Rightist Gen X-ers in Denmark clearly decided that this project was worth defecting parties over, allowing the left to become the new dominant party. Rightists will invoke maintaining the national character of the nation, over providing welfare goodies, but the result is the same -- bolstering the system of post-neoliberalism, by giving both sides of the aisle a buy-in for supporting it.
So, not only do I expect much more actual action from Democrats going forward -- largely from the Gen X and Millennials among them -- but increasing defection from people who supported Trump / MAGA. Nothing succeeds like success. All it will take is Gen X and Millennial Democrats unplugging America from the Israeli parasite, and that will trigger a generational defection of voters to their side, regardless of whether they used to support Trump eons ago.
ReplyDeleteDems are uniquely poised to do that, since the main relationship between Israel and America is military, and the military controls the GOP, not the Dems. So there is far less built-in structural commitment to the Israeli alliance, among Dems. They will pursue this unplugging of the parasite invoking their left-wing principles, but right-wingers won't care, and will vote for them by invoking their own principles. The result will be the same: generational turnover in American linkage to Israel.
In fact, America and Israel being joined together is another facet of the neoliberal era, and was absent during the New Deal, when Eisenhower drove Israel out of the Suez on behalf of Egypt. Only with the Camp David Accords of 1978 did America begin transitioning away from supporting Arab nationalism and checking Israel, to buying off Egypt, Israel, and Jordan to halt the Arab-Israeli wars, and focus just on Israel destroying the Palestinians, which Egypt and Jordan turned a blind eye to after they were paid off.
The surge in Holocaust saturation of American culture only traces back to that year as well. None of that was set in stone, it was due to a once-every-50-years realignment. That paralleled a realignment within Israel, from the Labor Zionist era to the Likud era in the '70s.
The neolib era is ending in America, and the Likud era is ending in Israel, so decoupling from Israel will only accelerate over the next 10 years and beyond. Boomers won't be able to stop it, cuz they'll either be dead or out of office, and their Great Replacement by Gen X and Millennials will tune out their Zionist whining, while pulling the plug on the main trigger of the rapid collapse of American living standards during Trump: Season Three.
Hold onto your butts -- the Gen X and Millennial baddies are about to take us on a wild ride to places we never even dreamed were possible to be taken to...
Also needs to be emphasized the Dems have dropped wokeness, while the GOP is playing catch-up by trying to preserve the 2010s era of shrill women lecturing young men about being toxic gamers and so on.
ReplyDeleteI paid little attention to the campaign pitches, since I knew I was going to vote straight-Dem no matter what. But if there had been some snide remark about toxic masculinity, why does the world even need men, "it's her turn", women should be able to "have it all" (Boomer slogan from the '70s and '80s), etc., I would've heard it. But I didn't.
Nothing about gayness or trannies either. They've gotten their woke paroxysm out of their system by now, and can also read the room about the ballot initiatives about requiring photo ID and citizenship to vote. Even liberal haven Washington state passed a ballot initiative to prevent guys from playing in girls' sports.
They're not promoting Grindr, Tinder, OnlyFans, sports betting apps, or any of that garbage. If given the power, they will likely rein that garbage in. That was strictly a distraction campaign given the green light by Boomers so that young people would ignore their deteriorating standard of living, if they could be given a suitably addictive opiate. Currently, only the "tech right" is still promoting that as the opiate of the masses.
Gen X and Millennial women will be happy to close the door on that era of woman-degrading history. "We cannot allow an economy where young women feel their only viable path to financial self-sufficiency, is using an OnlyFans account as a client recruitment tool for offline prostitution."
They will probably even invoke the degradation it does to guys as well, rather than demonizing them for being horny, and rather than telling them to stop whining about how expensive their rent is since they are spoiled brats who can stream HD porn on their smartphone after all, so what more do you want from society? They will take that angle if they want to encourage cross-over and defection, which they do.
Gen X women grew up during a void in the timeline of feminism. There is no such thing as "Third Wave feminism", unlike the strong Second Wave and Fourth Wave / woke 2010s incarnations of feminism. They really don't hate men on a visceral level, and don't seethe at men for occupying career positions that they themselves want to seize for themselves (that's a Silent / Booomer yuppie ambition, from the '80s). They grew up during the peak of social harmony, from the mid-'70s through the mid-'90s, and imprinted on that social atmosphere.
That predisposition, coupled with all the anti-woke ballot measures that just passed, herald the rise of an anti-woke left or non-woke left or "don't ask, don't tell if you're woke" left. Very clueless people will joke about the return of the 2010s, based on the Democrat tsunami of last night, but history doesn't go back and forth like that.
Gen X and Millennials felt sufficiently hopeful during the mid-2010s that they could indulge these dumb culture war topics, as luxuries. But now that everyone's standard of living is plummeting off a cliff, there will be no return to performative wokeness or counter-wokeness. No one feels like they're living a luxury lifestyle anymore, so luxury topics like that are out the window.
Likewise there will be no organized violence, since that peaked in 2020, according to Peter Turchin's 50-year cycle model of civic discord and breakdown. Anyone predicting a rise in riots, etc., is just writing fanfic (as the would-be perp or victim, only based on whether they're left or right). There won't be another explosion of riots until the 2060s.
ReplyDeleteSo, that's the major difference between this tsunami and the Trump tsunami of 2016 -- the atmosphere was far more heated back then, so it felt more significant than this one, which was emotionally low-key. But that's only related to the cycle of civic discord vs. "era of good feelings", which is a separate cycle from the generational turnover in the party system. We are already undergoing, or at the doorstep of a new party system, but it doesn't feel so significant since we have considerably mellowed out since 2016 and 2020, on all sides.
Only those still stuck in the 2010s are missing it... the arrival of normie socialism, overturning edgelord neoliberalism. ^_^
Democrats are going to dismantle stuff like Social Security and Medicare because they largely benefit retired Boomers instead of Millennials.
ReplyDeleteDemocrats are poised to invert Social Security so Boomers pay Millennials / Zoomers, which is what the original spirit of the welfare program was -- for the more fortunate, or structurally secure, to pay for those who were less fortunate, or structurally insecure.
ReplyDeleteIn the old days, old people quit working for wages around 60, and didn't have much to live on, and had little saved up since they weren't rich while they were working either. They had no mega-pricetag assets to sell off either. So, the people lucky enough to be working and earning good money -- which was everyone under the New Deal utopia -- paid to pad the landing of the elderly.
But now, Boomers are the richest generation in world history, and have been their whole lives. They can never get turned down from a well-paying job, they can switch jobs whenever wherever, and they have locked the entire economy down at the top levels since the 1990s. They are in no need, therefore they deserve zero Social Security.
Rather, the shoe is on the other foot now, where young people -- anyone after Boomers -- have been less fortunate than Boomers, at every step of their lives, compared to Boomers at the same point in their lives. Structurally, they're locked out of good jobs that are being guarded and hoarded by Boomers. And Boomers enjoy paying themselves handsomely, but are tight-fisted when it comes to hiring employees under them, hence why so many opt to fire Americans and hire cheap foreigners.
Therefore, if Boomers won't leave their top-level jobs or pay their employees what they themselves were making in the 1990s, adjusted for inflation, then the central state must seize their earnings at the point of being paid, and re-distribute it to the post-Boomer generations, who are actually and enduringly needy.
Exact same logic and spirit as the New Deal program, but flipped for who's paying who, to account for the flip in who is wealthier and more secure than who.
Medicare you can argue about, since Boomers are inherently more needy of medical treatment, owing to the diseases that strike or accumulate when you're old. But all the wasteful stuff like boner pills for Boomers, etc. -- all gone. And the super-duper expensive stuff at the very end of life anyway -- sorry, that's gotta go, too. We can't impoverish 67% of society just to squeeze a few more weeks or months out of the end of a Boomer's life. If it were free, of course, do it -- but it will bankrupt the nation to keep mis-allocating scare resources to do so.
ReplyDeleteReining in Medicare will be harder, even for Dems, since a big chunk of their elite coalition is hospitals and the universities they're attached to. Reverting medical care to what it was when Medicare was begun, will drain enormous amounts of wealth currently devoted on autopilot to the university-hospital industrial complex.
So the counter-balance is to lower that spending a bit, but re-allocate who gets it -- namely, post-Boomers, who have rarely had decent healthcare throughout their whole lives. Some of them don't even have it.
This can be accomplished through the "Medicare for all" slogan. In reality, the amount spent on Boomers would be slashed, but they would still get what they need. And what was slashed from Boomers, would go instead to post-Boomers, who currently get nothing. So, everyone joins Medicare, it's for all, and the university-hospital industrial complex still rakes in a steady pile of free government money. But it will be re-routed to medical care for post-Boomers and what they need.
And a single-payer approach slashes the costs like crazy, since there is a huge "take it or get nothing" incentive for healthcare providers.
The main elite institutions struck there are health insurance companies, part of the finance sector, who are 100% Democrat. This is one case where one of their elite groups will be sacrificed, in terms of wealth controlled by them. They can be re-assigned to administer the single-payer Medicare for All system, it's not like healthcare is going to disappear -- it just won't be administered by greedy insurance companies. So they'll still have cozy white-collar jobs with guaranteed demand for their services, paid by the government -- just not the treasury-bankrupting prices that they extort now as private financial institutions.
And the real big finance group in the Democrats is the Wall Street banks, not the Midwestern health insurance companies like the one that guy run, who Luigi popped. If Wall Street banks are not driven out of business, Democrats can get away with it. Those banks are mostly in large-scale investments, not providing health insurance.
If food quality were better (more meat / more grass fed meat, etc), then everyone would be thinner. In the Mississippi Senate race, when pressed about rising beef prices, the incumbent Republican said "there are other proteins" to choose from.
ReplyDeleteOzempic alone was going to bankrupt the state employee insurance program of North Carolina.
It's a Danish pharma company that makes Ozempic, and Denmark doesn't allow Ozempic for fatties, just diet and exercise.
Big pharma with its super expensive but super toxic cancer drugs is such a scam!
Housing is a cool case of geographic split in Dem interests. There is simply no way they will dispossess the urban landlords, especially the Ashkenazi cartel in New York City. However, suburban real estate is not part of their domain, and rural even less so. So if in suburbia there's some corporate real estate company, or just a bunch of individual Boomers with second homes, who are refusing to rent for affordable prices and letting the places sit vacant -- they can be expropriated immediately by Democrats, since those are 90% Republican victims.
ReplyDeleteThis applies even if the real estate is not vacant, but occupied at exorbitant rents.
And who wants to live in suburbia? Some Dems, and a decent amount of Republicans -- but who currently can't afford to, due to greedy Republican landlords. There's a huge material motive to defect from suburban Republican voter to suburban Democrat voter -- "We will slash your rents without making you victims, only the predatory landlords who take you nice suburban residents for granted."
That goes for commecial real estate, not just residential -- do you have any idea how much vacant commercial real estate there is in suburban America? Every shopping center has at least 1 space, sometimes an entire stretch of them, that have been sitting vacant since before Covid, due to retail-pocalypse, infinite QE for landlords, and then Covid amping that up on steroids. That will be seized by the central Democrat government, and operated on a fair basis, so it won't sit as a vacant eyesore for years on end.
Easiest pitch in the world to suburbanites -- "By evicting the greedy commercial landlords who shamefully allow so many spaces in your wonderful neighborhood shopping centers to sit vacant for years on end, we will revitalize your community, encouraging local small businessmen to open up shop, and employ local residents as well."
Urban real estate will be a tougher nut to crack, but just by clearing out the dead weight of suburban landlords, that will open up a massive pressure release valve from the urban core -- suddenly it's way more attractive to GTFO of the city and move to the burbs. With lower demand in urban real estate, its rents will naturally fall. So those who choose to stay in the core will enjoy an indirect rent-lowering effect by expropriating the suburban slumlords.
Moving to the burbs affordably, where you want to raise a family, etc. -- what better material incentive to get large defections from Republicans?
These changes should be branded as "Rolling prices back to the Clinton years!" to maximize loyalty to the Dems, if they want to permanently bring over a big chunk of defectors. Prices adjusted for inflation, of course -- but that's all people want. Even adjusting for inflation, housing is twice as expensive as it used to be, and that must apply to leasing commercial space if you're an aspiring local small business.
ReplyDeleteLook at all the cool stores America used to feature, in every little town across the nation -- cuz rents were low, and you didn't need to be the local franchise of a mega-corporation, just to afford the lease.
That will tend to wipe out the big box retailers -- good, everybody hates them, and they're 100% Republican anyway, not a single Democrat will have to fall on their sword to wipe Walmart off the map of America.
Which party can provide you with the proverbial state-mandated big-titty goth gf? Since none of them are Republican, that means the Democrats.
ReplyDeleteBut in reality, they won't give you welfare pussy, like paying for a prostitute or whatever. That is going away.
They will make it possible to meet people and socialize again, like at the spaces currently sitting vacant across the nation. Make it a little hang-out space, and make it a non-profit so it's cheap to hang out there for young people. Like the rec centers that Boomers enjoyed back during our New Deal utopia, where you could not only hang out with friends, but chat up someone from the opposite sex.
If rec centers were before your time (which they are for me as well), just watch Dazed and Confused, and check out what a socially rich and encouraging environment was provided to Boomers by society's elites, largely for free, before neoliberal hell.
Maybe Democrats could nationalize some of the dating apps, re-brand as wholesome normie matchmaking apps, and run them as non-profit social services -- for those who don't want to meet people IRL or through friends or whatever. There will still be a need for that, just not the Silicon valley libertarian degradation that they are right now.
Jack up the minimum wage to what it was in 1980, the last year of the New Deal, and index it to inflation.
Between the other sweeping changes, young guys will have a lot more money in their pocket, less dire living situations, and places and chances to meet girls. And likewise for young girls -- they won't have to look forward to corporate slavery or prostitution ("sugar daddying"), just to live decently.
Guys and girls can pair up based on liking each other once again, not out of dire economic necessity.
And shut down most of the porn sites, which will please feminists within the existing Dems, and bring over morally conservative or moderate Republicans.
ReplyDeleteNot that porn will hold much appeal when there's a thriving local scene where you can touch and get touched by girls IRL, like a dance club. That's why young guys who were horny as hell in the good ol' days rarely resorted to pornography -- that was for desperate dirty old men who had no viable alternative. Guys could hang out at the rec center, scope out babes at the mall, or go dancing, and there was more than enough physical attention from eager horny girls.
You didn't even need to get laid, which was properly seen as "scoring" or "getting lucky", in other words a pleasant surprise, but not required. It was icing on the cake, which was... well, cake! Girls will let you put your hands on their buns if you're on the dancefloor, or making out in the woods behind the rec center.
Zoomers, who were born too late, may not appreciate that, unless they're in the minority of hot guys who get female attention even in a socially atomized environment. But in the good ol' days, everybody used to get lucky -- that's why it's called the good ol' days. It was not an atmosphere of hypergamy, even the mids of both sexes met each other, smiled at each other, had sex with each other, and married each other.
That egalitarian atmosphere of the New Deal utopia has been replaced by inegalitarian striving and competion-ism during neoliberal hell. But it cannot go on forever, nothing ever does. Given how collapsing the American pie is becoming, there will be increasingly less to vie for by competing, which will force young people to stop trying to claw their way to the top. What prize is there at the top anymore? Nothing, and it'll be worth less and less over time.
So you, as a young girl, might as well just hang out at the local rec center, see which boys look your way, and smile and chat with the ones who have show some interest, rather than hold out for an amazing catch -- that will be considered "getting lucky", as it should be.
Oh, and start criminalizing being a sugar daddy, which creepy old men use to entrench hypergamy against younger guys. This is a no-brainer win-win for both feminists -- targeting johns rather than prostitutes -- and disaffected young men, who are robbed of their babe-alicious peers by creepy old men with ill-gotten dirty money to throw around.
Democrats could re-segregate gays from normies again, as well, without offending any side. They would simply sponsor overly gay-branded spaces, operated by gays, catering to gays, etc. This will draw gays to these spaces, and away from normie spaces, where they currently creep around since there are no more gay-segregated spaces or gayborhoods anymore.
ReplyDeleteIt's insane how creeped-over by gays a typical place in suburban Anywheresville is today. Well, create and sponsor overly gay spaces, and there goes most of the problem.
Pick one or two urban core neighborhoods and literally offer a 25% off the rent discount if you're gay -- that will instantly remove gays from normie neighborhoods.
Gays get their gayborhoods and gay bars back, normies get to enjoy not being creeped out by fags crawling around everywhere in what are supposed to be normie spaces. Everybody's happy.
And believe me, normies will absolutely pay a little bit of their taxes to re-segregate gays, and liberal types will pay that amount to encourage human rights, gay liberation, etc. Everybody agrees it was better in the New Deal utopia when gay-world was segregated from normie-world.
If you were a fag-hag or whatever, you weren't prevented from hanging out in a gayborhood, you had to prove your fag-hag bona fides by making the trek to the gayborhood rather than clog the suburban Starbucks with you and your gay BFF annoying and/or creeping out the normies who actually belong there.
And perhaps it will force gays to look unique again. On top of the creep factor of merely being a guy checking out normie guys in public, gays these days look like absolute shit, like bums, which makes it even creepier. Or they're the uncanny valley of someone pretending to look like a generic suburban accountant or realtor, but just a visibly creepy gay version of that.
When gays are re-segregated, they will develop their own fashion cycles and sartorial shibboleths again, by interacting with one another instead of straight-world, and not creep out normies while looking like disheveled bums.
*overtly
ReplyDelete"OK, he may be homophobic, but he's right..." There's your realigned coalition right there. I will gladly join gays in a strictly political coalition, if its politicians re-segregate them from normies again, like it was during what everyone agrees was the good ol' days.
ReplyDeleteRight now, Republicans not only don't offer that, they are the #1 force to normie-fy gays in all domains of society -- encouraging them to get a beard like J.D. Vance, have kids with a woman they have negative chemistry with, move out to the suburbs or normie urban neighborhoods, and dress like dorks while creepily stalking straight guys in normie spaces, as long as they don't come out.
And the religious conservatives would never tolerate the re-opening of the gay district, which was de facto a red light district, anywhere. They want to convert gays, normie-fy gays, do the exact opposite of sponsoring a gay-only part of town where God only knows what's going on.
Conservatives are simply too stupid to see the 2nd-order effects, like how that would remove gays from normie world, especially from places that should be wholesome and family-friendly. They autistically focus narrowly on curing the gays of their sins, when gays are such a small percent of society, rather than zoom out to the greater social good, where the normie majority could enjoy fag-free living once again.
So naturally, Republicans cannot be trusted to do this -- in fact, you can bet they would fight this tooth-and-nail. Well, sucks to them and their collapsing coalition. Gays will no longer be subjected to conservative crusades to culturally convert them and normie-fy them -- they will be allowed to thrive in their distinctly gay gayborhoods and gay bars, gay shops, and gay wherever elses -- away from normies, who breathe a sigh of relief.
The only thing Republicans offer normies is performative online gay-bashing, like letting posters say the "fag" word on Twitter again, or targeting gay / tranny posters and sites for trolling, cyber-bullying, etc.
ReplyDeleteI don't care if isolated individuals get to call someone a fag on the internet again -- I want to breathe gayless air in my normie suburban environment. I don't want to see a fag-hag and gay BFF ever again. I don't want gay creeps camping out at the thrift store to creep. I don't want to see a tranny as the cashier at every gas station.
Republicans, as constructers of the current neoliberal hell, are only adept at finding new ways to give opiates to the masses, so they won't overthrow the status quo. Like encouraging cyber-gay-bashing, which is fruitless and just impotent venting into the digital void. Just get them out of our normie spaces, and quarantined in their little gay zoo in a part of town the rest of us never have to visit -- and where they wouldn't want us ruining their flamboyant festivities with our normie square-dom anyway.
Never settle for Republican opiates -- demand the real deal from Democrats, and get something meaningful for once in your life.
LOL at noobs thinking I'm just now warming up to Democrats for realignment, when I advocated for a Trump-Bernie unity ticket way back in April 2016, during the Year of Trump. Unlike take-junkies addicted to twitter, I don't need podcasters to tell me what to think. If anything, they read me, not the other way around.
ReplyDeletehttps://akinokure.blogspot.com/2016/04/trump-sanders-vs-clinton-cruz-thought.html
Once Trump bombed and invaded Syria in April 2017, I knew it was over, and that's when the whole party system cycle came to my attention. It's originally by Skowroneck. After delving into that, and seeing it play out throughout American history (and other nations), I knew the GOP (or any replacement party of it) would not be the realigning force as we transition into a new cycle. So I ditched them, and have been pulling for realigning Dems ever since.
And even during Trump: Season One, I voted for a local Green candidate in 2016, voted for Sherrod Brown in 2018, etc.
Only a butthurt coping right-wing dummy could read this as "Dems will save the collapsing empire". The empire is collapsing, but it won't stay in the same phase forever. The Roman Empire didn't stay in the Antonine phase forever, nor in the Severine phase forever, nor in the Barracks Emperors phase forever, nor in the Diocletian phase forever, nor in any phase forever.
Your party is donezo, any potential replacement party from the right is DOA, and you have negative prospects for the rest of your coping life. And in case you can't tell from the wave of voters telling you to eat shit, nobody will cry -- it will be funny seeing Republicans cope themselves to death, if they're not imprisoned or executed first. ^_^
Critical mass of Gen X + Millennials in Congress means old guard is on their way out the door. To elaborate on why the near-term holds much more fundamental change than during everyone's lifetime, unless they can remember the last realignment of 1980, it's worth emphasizing that dynamics that are unfolding.
ReplyDeleteIn the 2000s or 2010s, any Gen X-er who somehow made his way into Congress was a minority, and vastly outnumbered by the Me Gen coalition (Silents + Boomers), who constructed the most recent system, neoliberalism / Reaganism since 1980. So, there was simply no numerical way to overwhelm the establishment. There was no out-sized influence that a small number of X-ers could use either.
In fact, the arrow of influence pointed in the other direction -- any incoming X-ers were assimilated into the Me Gen super-majority. If they didn't yield to the Me Gen agenda, they were frozen out by the super-majority, the funders of the super-majority, the media mouthpieces for the super-majority, and so on.
They were like a handful of immigrants who assimilate into the host nation, since they don't have enough of their peers from the old country to sustain an ethnic enclave in the new country.
For example, the current Dem House Leader is Hakeem Jeffries, who got elected to NY state govt in 2006, and joined Congress after winning in 2012. So, although he's a Gen X-er by birth, he has been molded functionally and structurally into a Boomer, based on when he entered Congress, who the super-majority was at the time, who paid his bills, who promoted him in the media, etc. All of those forces pushed him to adopt the Me Gen agenda (neoliberalism), or get flushed out of the system.
A decade and a half later, there are not so many Boomers left in the House, especially when the next Congress reflects the most recent changes. Check out the new members of Congress:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_new_members_of_the_120th_United_States_Congress
In the House, only 11 newcomers are Boomers (no Silents). Fully 50 of the newcomers are Gen X (1965-80), another 42 are Millennials, and there's even 2 Zoomers joining.
Absolutely NONE of them are entering their blank-slate impressionable stage of political office under a Me Gen neoliberal super-majority. There will be a very stark contrast between Gen X-ers who are just now joining Congress, and those who initially got in when it was still dominated by Boomers. Likewise for the handful of Millennials who entered during Obama's defense of neoliberalism from the Democrat side, vs. Millennials just joining in 2027. Zoomers will suffer no influence whatsoever from a Boomer environment, since they're just now joining in decent numbers, when it's at most a Gen X environment.
This massive generational turnover is being masked by the focus on partisan turnover, since newcomers could be post-Boomers replacing Boomers from the same party. Ditto for Senators and state governors.
So, rather than being co-opted and assimilated into the establishment, this critical mass of post-Boomers will be capable of, and materially inclined toward setting up a generational enclave within the Me Gen-constructed establishment.
ReplyDeleteThey will also be inclined to view their gen-mates who entered early and were co-opted by the sheer overwhelming force of the Boomer super-majority in those olden days, as traitors to their generation, and unfit to lead the new enclave, which will in fact not be a tiny enclave but a growing majority.
The Senate is a tougher nut to crack, but the same dynamics will play out there. Boomers + Silents still have a supermajority there. But there is a growing post-Boomer enclave in the Senate as well, and they will not have entered under Boomer influence, will owe no allegiance to literal not just functional Boomers like Schumer as their leader, and will institute a Great Replacement as well, just with some delay after the House.
State governors do not have to caucus on a national level, so they are free to get their post-Boomer agendas rolling right away.
The same is true for the next post-Boomer president at the national executive level.
Remember: the logic of "don't bite the hand that feeds" works in reverse -- "bite the hand that has not fed, is not feeding, and will never feed". Gen X-ers like Jeffries who have been fed by the Boomer hand since their inauguration will do everything to defend its agenda. But those who have entered Congress without Boomer sponsorship, indeed in some cases after being abandoned by the Boomer leaders of their own party, have been given every incentive by the establishment to bite its hand, which has never fed them.
Therefore, Boomer nostrums -- such as "Medicare for All is completely off the table, since we are no longer a Midcentury totalitarian dictatorship as we were during the boo-hiss New Deal, but a shining beacon of small-gov free market competition" -- will increasingly be all bark, no bite. As time goes on, the growing critical mass of post-Boomers will simply sideline those who peddle this warmed-over Reaganite garbage that has wrecked the nation over the past several decades.
The restless hordes of post-Boomers have already pushed their way through the gates of the House, and it is only a matter of time before they storm the citadel of the Senate, and lay siege to the White House. It is no longer a matter of "if" neoliberalism will be generationally replaced, but "how soon".
Trump state coalition lies in shambles, masked by the focus on nationwide partisan flips. There were indeed a lot more partisan flips than usual, but they were concentrated in the very states that were crucial to the would-have-been realignment led by the Trump / MAGA Republicans. These states, and even some die-hard red states, have decisively canceled their subscriptions to the MAGA agenda, which they had only bought into on a trial basis in the first place, not a life-long loyalty pledge.
ReplyDeleteContrast the current 119th Congress, which reflects the Trump victory of 2024, to the upcoming 120th Congress, which will reflect the Trump / MAGA / Republican poisoning of their own voters, and their consequent flip into the Democrat coalition.
In the Senate, there were only 3 purple states -- Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Maine. Now Maine will be a double-blue state, and to the ranks of WA and PA will be added 8 more purple states -- OH, IA, NC, SC, KS, TX, and AK, which were either tepid "red for Trump" states (OH and IA), or historical red states. Only Indiana remains as a double-red state bordering the Great Lakes.
Turning to the House, but focusing state by state, we can see this cancellation of the MAGA trial membership by those same Rust Belt states, which is obscured by the nationwide totals.
Contrasting the 119th with the 120th House delegations, and counting Democrats out of the total delegation size, none got more Republican, and most flipped from R-led to D-led state delegations.
OH: 5/15 -> 8/15 (flip)
MI: 6/13 -> 9/13 (flip)
PA: 7/17 -> 11/17 (flip)
IA: 0/4 -> 3/4 (flip)
WI: 2/8 -> 4/8 (tie)
MN: 4/8 -> 4 or 5/8 (potential tie-breaking flip)
Even in the Sun Belt, there were several other defectors:
NC: 4/14 -> 12/14 (MASSIVE flip)
AZ: 3/9 -> 5/9 (flip)
CO: 4/8 -> 7/8 (tie-breaking flip)
Although California has been trending toward Dem-only for some time, this election sealed the deal. There used to be 9 Republicans (of 52), and now there will only be 2.
New Jersey is another case where the dwindling is just about over, from 3 R's to just 1 (of 12) coming up.
The two regions where Boomers will cling most bitterly to the ruins of Reaganism are the Upper Plains and the Southeast, including Florida, which is by now just another Republican member of the Deep South.
Interestingly, although Texas flipped a Senate and governor seat blue (and the other state-level executive offices), they only added 1 seat to their House delegation, from 13 to 14 out of 38, still a clear minority. So now Texas is the new swing state, with major ticket-splitting, a willingness to throw out the party who has been entrenched for decades in some offices but not others, and whose enormous population size makes it impossible not to court.
Since the only offices protected by Republicans were the House districts, I doubt they could protect the presidential vote in 2028. So now Texas is a "likely Democrat" ace in the hole for the next presidential election, and Republicans should just end their party now, and not even bother fielding a candidate next time. Everyone will be too focused on what kind of Democrat they want, not whether they want Democrat or Republican.
Sayonara, suckers! ^_^
The ticket-splitting in Texas is proof that their throwing out of Republicans in the Senate race and every single state-level executive race, including governor, was not just due to Republicans being demoralized by Trump and his media mouth-pieces shitting all over them, while Democrats were highly motivated to turn out. That's just more Repulibcan cope to stave off thoughts of suicide.
ReplyDeleteIf that had happened, Democrats would have flipped shitloads more House seats than just 1 of 38, and they could have easily secured a majority of the House delegation, 20 of 38, given how wide the margin was for the Senate and governor, and applying that margin to the House gains in other states.
But Texans continued to vote R at the local level, if they already were, while voting D at the higher levels and in the executive branch.
A highly energized Dem-biased electorate did not simultaneously vote Republican for House races that were already Republican. That is obviously the same electorate turning out, voting as usual for local representatives, but throwing the bums out at the state level.
You can project that to how they'll feel about voting for a Republican presidential candidate in 2028, after 2 more years of Trump / MAGA bullshit.
Possibly they won't change their House delegation much, but they will absolutely be willing to "try their luck" by gambling on a Democrat president.
In fact, if I were managing the campaign for that Dem presidential candidate in Texas, I would court Republicans by explicitly saying, "It's good that you want to keep your Congressional district Republican -- it adds some needed variety and competition to the House debates. But the White House is only staffed by one party at a time, so I'm asking for you to try your luck on a populist that is neither left-wing nor right-wing, running on the Democratic ticket, if you feel burned by the Trump administration..."
Ultimately, realignment requires a Texas win for the Electoral College, and Senate votes, more than it needs a majority of its House delegation. And in order to secure that EC vote, a Dem running in Texas will have to openly, explicitly tell Republicans that it's a good thing for them to keep voting Republican for their House district, if they still want to. That's a sign of good faith and compromise.
War-caused damage to oil / gas industry causing GOP defections to Democrats. One of the most important things I've been on the lookout for, as realignment nears, is which elite sector of the GOP coalition is willing to defect to the Democrats, bringing their patronage network and voters along with them, to signal realignment.
ReplyDeleteOnce the Iran War kicked off, I was given a very plain and loud answer -- energy, especially oil and gas. Very stupid people continue to believe the Iraq War was about "blood for oil", when we never got any oil out of Iraq. Only the military was interested in war against Iraq, to conquer more territory, especially territory that had eluded it during the Cold War, when Saddam Hussein pursued a non-aligned position, favoring both the Soviet Union and America, depending on the situation.
Oil industry plant Dick Cheney, who eventually became VP under George W. Bush, had always warned against the military kicking off too much of a regional war in the Middle East, since that would disrupt oil & gas production, refinement, and transportation. If war in the Middle East brought energy production to a halt, the industry he served would go starving, even while the military was funded out the ass to pursue the war.
Oil & gas industry elites didn't care about human rights, non-violence, decolonization, self-determination, or anything else -- just the current and sustained health of their sector, energy production. When energy found itself in a coalition with the military, they could tolerate war -- if that warfare didn't eat into energy production.
During the New Deal, this tension never really reared its head, since most wars were fought in East Asia, where there is no oil or gas. And to the extent the American military was involved in Middle Eastern politics, it was not to kick off a regional war. In fact, Eisenhower shoved Israel out of the Suez in 1956, on behalf of Egypt.
When the Gulf Arab monarchies nationalized their oil fields away from American and other foreign companies, American energy executives did not ask the Pentagon to launch a war against Saudi Arabia in order to bring those oil fields back under American control. They simply accepted it as a political fait accompli, and sought to maximize their economic relationship with the Saudis, so that American rather than other foreign companies could benefit the most from the extraction, refinement, and transportation of fossil fuelds that originated from Saudi soil.
Likewise for the natural gas industry cozying up to Qatar, with its immense natural gas fields.
Well, when the school-shooter-led Pentagon launched its war against Iran on behalf of the "school shooter as a state", Israel, Iran immediately attacked Persian Gulf oil & gas infrastructure, which halted production, and closed the Strait of Hormuz, which halted transport of oil & gas.
ReplyDeleteOne of the first targets was the Ras Laffan Industrial City in Qatar, by far the largest export facility for natural gas. And yes, it was the size of an entire city, not just one random building. The main foreign partner was American, ExxonMobil, who had invested in the billions of dollars just to bring it online, which they expected to be pay off handsomely into the future, as the main investor in the main natural gas export facility.
When Iran literally blew those plans to smithereens, billions of dollars in upfront costs by ExxonMobil got vaporized -- not to mention the lost future stream of profits, since this facility is never coming back online. When production does resume, it will not be with an American backer, since the Americans have proven to be incapable of protecting their investments, and incapable of restraining the school-shooter military of their nation, meaning it's only a matter of time before the Pentagon would strike Iran again, triggering Iran to destroy the rebuilt facility all over again. Also, America has proven incapable of opening the Strait of Hormuz, so even if the gas could be extracted and refined and packaged, it could not be transported without the say-so from Iran.
With their massive upfront costs sunk, and the entire future stream of profits lost for good, ExxonMobil has the strongest incentive to defect from the GOP coalition, and if anything to have Trump neutered. As I said back then, if I were Trump, I wouldn't accept any invitations to go on a hunting trip with Dick "The Shotgun" Cheney.
On top of Trump destroying their industry, he also strove to throw its leaders under the bus during the summer, decrying them for high prices at the pump, due to the war Trump himself started. He angrily demanded they lower gas prices on several high-profile occasions.
So, in addition to having the orange retard blow up your industry, you were also now being made to be the fall guy for spiraling gas prices. Gee, with political friends like Trump, who needs enemies? They have every incentive to defect, and have Trump impeached, removed, imprisoned, and executed. They at least want some payback, so the guy who blew up their industry doesn't get away scot-free.
The oil & gas industry is heavily concentrated in Texas, so is it any wonder that that state was the site of the most high-profile defections against Trump and the GOP Senate? ExxonMobil is headquartered in Houston, and the state produces over 40% of American crude oil. It also plays a huge role in refinement of oil, not to mention being located along the Gulf of Mexico, where there are natural gas fields.
ReplyDeleteIf any single state would show an electoral backlash from Republican voters, in relation to the destruction of the oil & gas industry, it would be Texas. And it looks like exactly that happened. It's not just workers on oil rigs who are screwed -- the industry is so huge it employs all sorts of other positions, like chemical engineers, construction workers, and the typical blue and white-collar jobs that go with any major industry. Secretaries, HR, janitors, accountants, lawyers, consultants, computer janitors, you name it.
It's not just the fat cats on the corporate board who now have to eat shit due to Trump and the Pentagon -- the professional living in suburban Houston now has little demand for his services, as his entire industry becomes paralyzed due to the Pentagon & Israel's unprovoked war against Iran.
Some of those professions are industry-specific, so they can't just jump off a sinking ship and onto a stable ship instead. The whole industry has been deliberately torpedoed by Trump, the GOP, and the Pentagon -- and vilified by the culprits for trying to save itself, while it capsizes. Even the services that are transferable to other industries, cannot magically wave a wand and create enough job openings in industry Y after industry X has been torpedoed. Industry Y already has enough job openings as it needs, it can't accommodate a massive influx of refugees from industry X, as sad as they may feel (which they probably don't, and that makes those stuck on the sinking ship even angrier).
Alaska is the other very surprising defector from the GOP, with both the Senate and governor seat being yanked out of Republican hands during the same election. They are a big player in the "other than Texas" oil producers, and since the rest of their economy is not as diverse as Texas, some 10-15% of Alaska's economy relies on energy production. That is likely to anger a large chunk of the electorate, as well as state-level elites, who not only can't rely on the GOP to support them -- they can rely on the GOP to destroy them, while callously blaming their destruction on the victims rather than the perps at the Pentagon.
Mississippi was another surprise flip for its Senate race, and although it's not a major energy player, it lies along the Gulf coast as well, and probably enjoys some lateral effects of its western neighbor, Louisiana, having such a profitable refining sector -- until the Pentagon starts a pointless war that halts the production of the input material, crude oil. By taking double-digit percentages of crude oil production offline, there is a lot less work for the refining industry in Louisiana to do.
If I were trying to make further inroads into deep-red Southern states, I would target Louisiana, specifically the refining industry -- both the elites and everyone it employs, at any degree of removal. Trump blew up your way of life, the Pentagon egged it on, and the military is still the major shot-caller in the GOP -- so how can you trust a GOP White House not to keep making things worse for you? Vote Republican for you Congressional district if you want, but in the White House, I promise not to start a single war in the Middle East, and to repair the damage done by Trump to our relationship with Iran, so that you can recover sooner rather than later.
The other potential defector is cattle ranchers, who Trump has destroyed with the pointless tariff war (aimed at punishing random countries we have no beef with, over things we do not and cannot produce, like chocolate). He also gutted the monitoring program for New World screwworm and other parasites, inflicting further damage on the cattle industry. And just as in the case of oil & gas, he had the gall to blame ranchers for skyrocketing beef prices, when Trump himself is directly responsible for all of the problems relating to beef -- both the industry-specific destruction like tariffs, ending parasite monitoring, etc., and the nationwide destructions like rising gas prices to transport goods due to the Iran War.
ReplyDeleteBut wait, that's not all! After the pointless tariff war, he sought to bring literal tons upon tons of foreign beef -- toxic sludge from his corrupt Ashkenazi counterpart in Argentina -- in order to somewhat mitigate the price increases domestically with greater supply. Well, that's a whole bunch of beef that American producers won't be selling, only the Argentine corporations who are dumping it onto the American market at Trump's urging.
Texas cannot grow much in the way of crops, but its ecosystems do allow for cattle ranching, and it is not only a key economic component of Texas, but one of its famous cultural symbols and points of pride, the longhorns.
Colorado is also a key cattle ranching state, with no crop cultivation. That could explain it's House delegation shrinking from half-Republican to just 1 Republican among 8 Reps, overnight.
If New Mexico were not already locked down for Dems, it would be revolting against Trump as well, since they are a major player in oil & gas, as well as cattle ranching (but not crops).
The Northern Plains are more reliant on crop cultivation than cattle ranching, so they aren't doing so bad. And there is one major oil producer, North Dakota, but perhaps the crop agriculture mitigates the damage done to its energy sector. So I don't expect them to defect so easily.
Iowa is a farming rather than ranching state, with no oil & gas industry, so its defection is more about the broader Rust Belt defection, even if it doesn't have a shoreline on the Great Lakes. By this point, it's almost like a state-sized exurb for Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota (no offense, just sayin').
So those are the two sectors for Democrats to aggressively court, both elites and every rung below on the patronage network, to flip former Republican strongholds into solid Dem or at least toss-up territory. Oil & gas, and cattle ranching.
It will give those industries a chance to vent their frustration at the orange retard and the GOP as a whole, explaining why the war was the trigger for all the rising prices, and not to blame the oil or cattle producers themselves. The buck has to stop with someone -- and it must be the military and the GOP, and Trump's circle specifically.
Most Americans will hear their horror stories and feel sympathy -- who *hasn't* had their lives fucked up by Trump and the dead-end Reaganite GOP?
"All of us have been harmed by Trump and the GOP, including us in the oil industry / cattle ranchers, who you might think would be the most loyal Republicans in the nation. But loyalty is a two-way street, and after having our industries targeted for destruction, and blamed for our own destruction when it was triggered by the war, we can no longer remain loyal to the GOP. We are casting our lot with the Democratic Party instead, who promises not to start any more of these wars that have destroyed our industries, and caused price increases for you, the hapless consumers. We feel your pain, since it was inflicted by the same malicious actor -- Trump and the GOP -- and we will now act, together with you, to terminate the source of that pain, once and for all..."
Tall bubble-butt Zoomette stopped me at the library book sale to say she liked my outfit, and that I'm "really cute". I've heard it for my adult life, but it's still reassuring to hear at 46. ^_^
ReplyDeleteIt helps to have a pretty boy face, and to be clean-shaven... the one piece of true free advice that Millennials refuse to benefit from, is to shave their damn 2010s Millennial beard. Not only cuz it's dated like skinny jeans, girls don't like it. They never have. Guys growing out beards is male-male competition, like girls competing over shoes, not something that is trying to appeal to the opposite sex for dating-and-mating.
It's funny cuz the incel type that whines the most, and thinks they're so originally clever, about how girls compete with each other over things that guys either don't notice or are turned off by (shoes, eating disorders, etc.), were the most enthusiastic about retreating from girls and only doing male-male competition during the 2010s manosphere / masculinity LARP trend, which requierd growing out your facial hair. "No shave November", came before "no nut November". Millennial guys are just as opposite-sex-hating as Millennial women. They really do deserve each other.
Oh yeah -- "steal his look!" Vintage Levi's blue jeans, brown ankle boots, navy blue striped shirt on white background, my lucky navy blue wool beret, and what really got her attention, a vintage red wool double-breasted jacket (Pendleton). Americans are too gloomy to wear red jackets anymore, but it was totally normal not too long ago. Mostly everything was vintage, and from thrift stores, which I made sure to tell her, and she was pleased and smiling to hear about.
The other ironic thing about incels whining about not wanting to look cool, is that the very type of girl they pine after -- the proverbial big-titty goth GF, or any kind of alt-girl -- are the ones who are most attuned to what you're wearing, and are the most eager to come on over, make the first move, and tell you they like how you look. They could be goth, cottagecore, indie, alt, whatever. This girl was alt-coded simply by wearing y2k-esque jeans, during a time when jeans are starting to vanish, as the great nothing of athleisure swallows up more Americans into its bland void.
ReplyDeleteThe one tip I can give you aside from these helpers about how to look, is the attitude -- DON'T make it a competition, especially not one against other guys. Dressing to impress other guys, per se, is literally gay. And don't make it a status contest of any kind, whether about wealth, "class", taste, etc. -- you will look exactly like what you are, an insecure striver. You're not a billionaire, you don't come from Olde Moneye, just give it a rest already.
The goal is to just look cool or fun or something that will brighten people's day. Don't try to invent your own style, just copy the classics, which by this point includes anything from the 20th century. I don't know if I looked like a particular era, possibly late '60s mod with the vivid red-white-and-blue. You can be eclectic -- it's not like you're going to be judged for accuracy like a LARP contest.
As much as online guys whine about the death of aesthetics and everything becoming a bland assault against the senses, they would never try to be part of the solution and look cool and go out in public to increase its visual appeal factor.
People will notice and appreciate it. But fundamentally that's the opposite of what the online Millennial / Zoomer guy wants -- he wants to turn everything into a contest, to own the competition, to own girls, to bla bla bla. Sorry, dork, being anti-social doesn't make you dominant, it just means nobody even knows who you are. You're an invisible non-entity, not an alpha chad imposing his will (lol).
Not that I do it for this purpose, but if you really wanted to wrap others around your finger, you would dress cool and hang out in public. That makes others want to follow your lead way more than being a bitter anti-social hater.
I don't think they actually want positive female attention either, as much as they whine about it. Or rather, they want it without deserving it, as another deluded goal of dominating others and imposing their will -- "you will tell me I'm hot even when I look mid or boring or horrendo, muahaha". No, dork, nobody will tell you anything if you look like that...
But if you *are* in the minority of Millennial and Zoomer guys who want positive attention, and to deserve it, this is one of the sure-fire ways to get it. It feels nice to receive sincere compliments, for something you have sincerely done.
Luv Zoomer girls... ^_^
I dreamed about Irys last night, after watching Mori's series of Majora's Mask streams, where she keeps using Irys' greeting whenever the Great Fairy shows up or uses the Great Fairy mask. And in Irys' twitter space, she said she is definitely *not* like the Great Fairy. All that back and forth put Irys on my subconscious brain...
ReplyDeleteI don't remember exactly what the setting was, it was IRL not an anime-esque environment. And it was Irys' IRL persona. It was the two of us, someone else, and we were expecting more people to come, some kind of event, but we didn't really know each other, just hugged hello and chatted for a bit. Perhaps it was supposed to be at Hololive's office building? Maybe they hired me as their resident sage for ancient languages? ^_^
I don't think much else happened after the initial greeting, since my cat woke me up. Still, worth noting, since even after 5 years of watching vtubers, this is only the 3rd dream I've had of one of them. I dreamed about Kiara, who seemed to know me well as a friend and was crossing the street excited to tell me something. And I had an erotic dream about the Goobinator several years ago. She never tried to sexy-fy her persona, she just had that effect on people.
Speaking of Kiara, I think she's a better fit to the original Great Fairy from Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask. Her or Marine, the two effortlessly sexy Hololive girls, and who can turn on the "overly attached oshi" charm if they want to. And Kiara's eyes open very wide at the top, just like the Great Fairy.
With the Ocarina of Time remake coming out, there's a lot of Millennial chatter about how disturbed they were by the Great Fairy when they first played it. I can testify as a Gen X-er who played it on debut, there was nothing creepy, weird, etc., about her to us. The prehistoric walkthroughs for the game on GameFAQs, written by X-ers, don't mention feeling awkward or creeped out by her, just noting in passing that she has an over-the-top laugh.
ReplyDeleteI actually liked her, along with the Gerudo baddies. She had such an intense, wide-eyed, locked-on stare, looming over you and angled down into your eyes, she was more like a siren or a mostly-good witch, someone you might not trust 100%, who may somehow be leading you to your doom. Yeah, but those wide eyes, her undivided attention beaming down into you, it was hypnotizing if anything, not awkward.
She's loud, erupting in laughter, instantly your best friend and guardian, helps you out with magic, heals your wounds, asks you to return any time -- a classic case of love-bombing from a BPD girl or maybe a bipolar girl during her manic phase. You just never see her during her destructive or depressive phase. It's a kid's game, after all, they didn't want to traumatize you.
And yet that's how a lot of Millennials reacted, traumatized. I wonder if that is another facet of their hyper-competitiveness, and their deluded overweening ambition about turning every social interaction into a contest of domination and imposing your will on the other party.
Like, "Bro, this foid is coming on way too strong, it's like she's treating me as her rival, trying to bend me to her will." As 12 year-olds, they didn't have the anti-social repertoire of "negging" yet (AKA insulting a girl), so they just acted traumatized, weirded out, and victimized by an exotic hottie with agency.
She controls all sorts of magical powers, Link is just a passive recipient of her powers, which he doesn't explicitly ask for or consent to in advance. She just materializes, looms over him, lifts him up into the air, which causes a slightly "uh-oh" grunt from him as he's no longer on firm ground, and unloads her magical powers onto him, then leaves with an orgasmic laugh.
Gen X reaction: "Damn, honey-bunny really knows what she wants to do, and doesn't wait around to do it..."
Millennials: "OMG, boundaries much? Who said you could do that to me anyway? Not me. Put me down, stay over there, and quit looking at me so intensely. You're trying to win against me, and I won't let you win, I must be the victor, the will-imposer. Psychotic foid..."
Millennials are just too uptight to enjoy the sublime danger of a siren who cannot be defeated or manipulated. She's not even an evil siren, she's your helper and healer... some gratitude the Millennial girl-haters show her.
There's nothing wrong with the damsel in distress characters, Gen X loves them too. Maybe cuz Millennials had over-protective helicopter parents, so they never learned to surrender to the fascination of the sublime and dangerous. The tiniest whiff of danger, and their brains get paralyzed.
ReplyDeleteBut it's not just them being wimpy or uptight, it really is about their urge to turn every social interaction into a domination contest, including relations between the sexes.
That's why Weird Science remains a quintessential Gen X movie, that could never be remade with Millennials -- they'd call their own creation, Lisa, a voodoo witch doctor foid who should be banished from this dimension, after seeing her magical powers at work. You can't beat her in a contest, so you're therefore a loser, and she's a winner, so she'll never respect you, never help you except out of pity, and would only sabotage you long-term.
Millennials are so paranoid about helpful baddies with agency! Just quit being so competitive, and let them work their witchy helpful healing magic already, Jesus...
That must be why Nintendo nerfed the Great Fairy's eyes for the remake, making them narrow instead of wide-open at the top. Millennials, and I guess Zoomers too, feel like they're being stalked by a predator if they see wide-open intense eyes, and freak out about being on the receiving end of an aggressor's agency. The narrowed-eyes look takes away her siren-like intensity and danger. She isn't unloading all that attention on you, isn't love-bombing you, so you are better able to resist her charms, since they're only being sent through a narrow filter.
Come to think of it, I never witnessed Millennials daring each other to a staring contest, when trying to flirt. That was pretty common for Gen X-ers, although we didn't treat it like a real rivalry sort of contest -- just an excuse to stare into each other's eyes, and make light of the seriousness of doing so. Millennials would have felt it was too high-stakes, if they lost it might go on their high school transcript and they'd never get into a good school... plus, who does this foid think she is, daring me to a contest where she could win and I could lose? She's coming on way too strong, like a predator.
That's why "overly attached girlfriend" was such a viral meme with Millennials in the early 2010s. It was their worst nightmare, from a horror movie, seemingly coming to life, with the wide-eyed stare to match.
Millennials are just too avoidant and agency-guarding, they can't just let go and accept situations where they're not in 100% self-control, involving others.
Are Zoomers better about this? IDK, I think they're more willing to let their guard down, open up, even if it means being "cringe" (i.e., not trying to dominate and impose your will). If the American culture industries were still thriving, I could see a sincere Zoomer or Alpha cover of "I Want You to Want Me"... not just the guys being able to sing it right, but the girls being receptive to it as well.
Awwww. ^_^
Inde Navarette's character in Obsession is another milestone in the Millennial / Zoomer view of wide-eyed facial expressions, and the opposite-sex attention they pour into the viewer, as the defining trait of a literal horror movie monster. Not something to wish for earnestly, but warned against as a monkey's paw kind of wish. You guys are so fucking paranoid about love, Jesus Christ...
ReplyDeleteAnd that movie was a mega-hit just last year, so this paralyzing terror of attention and attachment isn't going anywhere just yet. I wonder if it was mainly popular among Millennial audiences, or Zoomers, too. It starred Zoomers, and was written and directed by a Zoomer. But it still relies on the "overly attached girlfriend" fears of Millennials. IDK, it could span both generations.
Are Millennial / Zoomer girls allowed to express their longing and desire through facial expressions? There's a standard meme of a college girl at a party, biting her lip while she eyes someone across the room -- but her eyes are very conspicuously narrowed. You know the one:
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/girl-bites-lip
If she were biting her lip, *and* was raising her upper eyelids / eyebrows, she would trigger the Millennial defense mechanisms against "crazy ex-girlfriend" behavior. She can't look aroused or excited, she must look languid and sleepy, with eyes narrowing toward being shut in slumber. A person can't behave like a predator when they're dozing off, so as much as she may be signaling her desires, she isn't signaling any intensity of pursuing them. She's not a relentless hunter, she's just lazily drooling over something yummy she sees on a late-night TV commercial, before falling asleep on the couch.
It's still a signal of pleasure, but the kind of pleasure from the "rest and digest" nervous system, not the "fight or flight" nervous system.
The one time that Millennials came close to surrendering to the sublime appeal of the wide-open intense stare of a cute girl, was Boxxy in 2009. But even she had to dress it up in a semi-ironic "only a character" performance, and where it's still intended to be a horror-movie kind of facial expression, to shock or disturb the audience, or as a "lol so randumb" kind of humor. They can't just enjoy it on its own.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yavx9yxTrsw
As for when the earnest appeal of the wide-eyed intense babe stare faded away, it was sometime after 2003, when this print ad was published for Herbal Essences shampoo (then famous for their "shower orgasm" TV commercials). Nothing crazy, psycho, terrifying, horror movie, etc. about this girl or the ad as a whole. She's excited and aroused, that is a good thing, and if you want that same good feeling, buy the product that made her feel that way.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.ebay.com/itm/325901627749
The tagline -- "What's gotten into her?" -- is a double-entendre about penetration, and the fact that this facial expression isn't usual for daily activities. But the point is not that she's gone crazy, psycho, etc. It's that she's unusually excited. In the old days, you could say "What's gotten into her?" when she was doing something positive or enviable, like working extra hard or something. It didn't necessarily mean she's gone crazy, only crazy predators open their eyes like that, etc.
But this ad was not for Millennials, who in the late '90s and y2k were too young to be the target audience of these ads, which were for Gen X and late Boomers. And they didn't find anything creepy or predatory about wide-open eyes. They just signaled excitement -- and who didn't want a little extra excitement in their ho-hum lives?
Well, isn't that like contemporary soy-face from Millennials? They open their eyes pretty wide for that. Yeah but they either make a surprised face, which is not about pleasure, as in the Herbal Essences ad, or they make an angry glare using the rest of their eye region and mouth, as though they're aggressively beating their chest with their fists to signal how much they love the consumer product, and anyone who doesn't enjoy it is an enemy / hater / invading army of tourists / casuals.
It's not really about "excited nervous system + pleasure", as in the shampoo ad. Rather, it's about their typical hyper-competitiveness and making everything into an argument, debate, war, or display of aggression.
Remembering those Herbal Essences commercials, it makes me wonder if that was in the back of the minds of the creators of Ocarina of Time, when they designed the Great Fairy. She's straight out of that ad campaign -- in a private bath / shower setting (a pool inside of a cave), basically naked, excited eyes + pleasured giggles or moans, the orgasmic laugh before leaving, and the focus on her thick long flowing locks of hair. It might as well be an Herbal Essences commercial.
Those commercials are another core memory for Millennials about being embarrassed when they came on in the family room / living room, with parents present. Not just the sexual nature, but the unapologetic, abandoned excitement and affirmation of pleasure -- "Yes! Yes! Yes!" -- was cripplingly scandalous... and more so to the Millennials themselves, not their Boomer parents, who were used to far more "gratuitous sexuality" in movies from the '80s and early '90s.
Millennials who say they were creeped out by the Great Fairy don't say that she was only embarrassing when the parents were around, but if no one else was around, they didn't mind her or actually like her unabashed excitement. They say they were creeped out by her, even when they played the game alone.
So they must have felt similarly about the Herbal Essences commercials, if the model looked into the camera with wide eyes. Not all of them did, as in the print ad above. So maybe they didn't mind watching the commercials if she narrowed or closed her eyes, as in the "girl biting her lip" meme that they are fine with. But if the model straight-up stared into the camera with wide eyes, they would've changed the channel in terror, even if there were no parents around.
Glorious Nippon has preserved the wide-open eyes look on girls, while it has been banished in the American imperial orbit due to the terrifying fear felt by Millennial guys, and the control-freak tendency among Millennial girls (where excitement of the nervous system implies lack of self-control, driven by instincts and gut reactions).
ReplyDeleteAlthough IRL idols in Japan make wide-open eye faces, their main cultural export is emojis and anime / vtubers. Japan was the first to popularize the heart-eyes emoji in the 2000s, and it mainly caught on in the American orbit during the 2010s, as weeb culture took off like crazy. Nothing restrained about those eyes...
And just about every anime girl has her eyes drawn so the full iris is shown, or close to it. If the context calls for it, her eyes can be narrowed, but the default anime girl eyes show the whole iris. What differs is how the eyebrows are positioned, and what expression the mouth is making, to indicate childlike naivete vs. excitement vs. joy vs. love-bombing.
Most of the Japanese Hololive girls have a twitter pfp with their eyes wide open, although there's still plenty of variety in their expressions.
The thumbnail images for several of Marine's music videos show her with wide-open eyes, to show her intensity, excitement, and eagerness to make the audience just as excited as she is. For example, "Bishojo Muzai Pirates" and "Paipai Kamen de Doukashiran?"
The only one whose default look has a sleepy-eyed look, with a lowered upper eyelid, is Roboco, but that matches her chiru-chiru laid back personality. And even she has plenty of fanart that shows her with wide-open eyes. Wide-open eyes are simply too standard in Japanese pop culture to not utilize at least sometimes.
Then during the late 2010s there was the "ahegao face" trend in the American orbit, imported from Japan. This is a more blatantly sexual / pornographic expression, meant to show an orgasm face. Still, it does show the eyes wide-open instead of narrowed or closed, which are other standard options to show an "O-face". As with heart-eyes emojis and anime girls or vtuber models, this trend was mainly confined to the weeb subculture, but it was a notable exception within the overall atmosphere of "girls should never look excited".
The "ahegao" face was most viral on TikTok, and from Zoomer e-girls like Belle Delphine, so that makes me wonder if it was a Zoomer-driven trend. If so, that shows that it was mainly Millennials who are terrified or feel controlled / manipulated / dominated by a girl with an excited face, and that Zoomers have begun to ease up on that paranoia about female desire showing up as a state of excitement or arousal.
It's also worth noting that the "ahegao" face was not made with a connotation of "oh no, it's that crazy overly attached girlfriend face!" The girls were not doing an ironic parody or send-up of girls who look excited -- they were simply making an excited face for its own excitement value. And they were smiling, not making a threatening or aggressive expression with their mouth, nor a pained or fearful expression. It was not meant to be disturbing, and was not felt that way by the audience.
It was certainly in the degen / exploitation region of pop culture, but then so is most of the horror movie genre. And yet here was a little island of "girl with excited eyes, feeling pleasure" that was not portrayed as a horror movie monster, unlike in the mainstream.
So, in this as in so many other cases, Japan is a cultural oasis in an otherwise collapsing and corroding world. If you want to see "cute girl with wide-open eyes", you must watch an anime series or tune into a vtuber's livestreams. ^_^