The regime not even trying to argue that the truckers are wrong, and instead focusing all their energy attacking them as “bad” people—Nazi, racist, etc.—has a few important implications:
1. This is a weak frame that betrays a lack of confidence to withstand dissent
2. They are betting (correctly imo) that normie support for/against is driven almost entirely by which side is believed to be more virtuous
Which means the truckers can and should escalate this and call whatever bluffs are coming. The regime is on the ropes here and should be forced into submission…but this must be done in such a way that does not undermine the truckers’ moral standing…
This is very difficult to do against an opponent that are lying scum perpetrating an ongoing psywar in coordination with journos and tech gatekeepers, but it is the challenge before us and one I think the regime will lose.
The 5G war is on boys and this is what the battlefield looks like. The underlying substantive issue is almost irrelevant, except as a test of what the regime can impose on its people. This is critical territory. Support the truckers unconditionally. They must not back down.
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Friend told me his small red town in a red state 500 miles from the nearest international airport just announced it's having it's first ever Pride parade, including a drag show for kids sponsored by the town council.
This also came with a "Proclamation" issued by the city declaring the town a safe space and condemning bigotry blah blah blah, suggesting that any objections, let alone active resistance to a city-sponsored Pride week and kid's drag show is somehow verboten...
While you were playing your switch on the airplane, I decided to torture myself by watching the interahamwe film “Dear White People” using disposable airline headphones I could barely hear through, and now I am going to write a review:
Stylistically, the movie is a feature length low-brow teen soap opera you might’ve seen on 2000’s era WB, but with pretensions of making some big sociological/political statement about race and class, which it does pretty clumsily, but not without some (accidental) insight.
Firstly, the movie is not about white people at all. The white “characters” are duplicitous, selfish, dumb, inexplicably cruel, yes racist, undeserving of their privilege, and when portrayed sympathetically it’s a guy getting literally cucked by the black protagonist…
NPR Update: This article is very good look at the internal politics at NPR since 2016. Trump, then Covid, then BLM broke these people's brains. Though it's about NPR specifically, this story explains pretty much all of mainstream media over the last half decade
The writer, who is an NPR journo himself, pinpoints the big shift in how media perceived their job: from delivering relevant and useful information, to preaching moral and ideological instruction.
::Always has been:: yes, but things got markedly more pronounced post-Trump
The side story is CEO John Lansing, who took over NPR in 2019, went all in on Year Zero of St. George Floyd, and made it the "North Star" of NPR to acknowledge "white privilege," and "commit ourselves—body and soul—to profound changes in ourselves and our institutions."
When people say the culture is stuck they mean that it's iterating downward, replicating into ever more attenuated, high-compression copies of itself, like a financial system comprised of dozens of layers of synthetic derivatives with no new underlying asset creation
This can produce all sorts of novel artifacts that have the shape and texture of "new" material, but they aren't generative in and of themselves; they are stand-ins for the real thing, shadows of them
It's also simply a question of what domain of culture you are looking at. TV accelerated the dominance of middle brow culture. Digital accelerates low-brow. Vulgar, fully democratized.
Recently watched Terminator 2 and had forgotten that the super genius computer scientist who invents Skynet is black. This is peak 90's color blindness. The fact that he's black goes totally unremarked upon. It doesn't register at all.
As a friend has pointed out there is very brief window where the world's biggest mega celebrities are black men, Michael Jordan and Michael Jackson. Jordan wins his first ring the same year Terminator comes out. Black men were a universal everyman.
Was also recently watching 90's commercials with the kids––which they are oddly fascinated by btw––there's a McDonald's commercial with Jordan from this time. Just Jordan eating a burger, drinking a coke, and smiling. That's it. No dialog. Pure super-stardom.
Reminiscing about the boomers. People don't want to hear this but we're gonna miss them when they're gone. They had their blind spots, sure, but it will get worse. It will get much worse.
This is a boomer respecter account now
Thinking about the neighbor who'd stop by our house walking his dog on the weekend. I'd wake up on a Saturday and there was Mr. [x] in our kitchen drinking our coffee, reading our paper. No occasion. No reason. He'd borrow the lawnmower and go his merry way. Just boomer stuff.