Oh something I’m saying when I say it’s feeling pretty ‘80s, that’s a reactionary period. We’ve had 3 major ones in the 20th century – the Reagan '80s, the 50s, and the post-WWI “return to normalcy”, and they were all marked by processes that wrecked the things that came out of progressive tendencies since the last one, wiped the board, and reset the clock. So maybe take brace position for that.
1980s: Blacks and cities get chewed up by crime, drugs, and general “urban decay”, gays have AIDS to deal with. The “Farm Crisis” also pretty much ends America’s vs long and historically quite central tradition of family farming. A rising Christian conservatism lays claims on the culture
1950s: the Second Red Scare digs out leftism which had established itself throughout national institutions through the Depression and Popular Front '40s. The Third KKK; attempts to suppress Black agitation fail largely for lack of cross-sectional unity, however, and the Civil Rights Era kicks off. Significant cultural backlash: the stifling conformity dramatized in say Pleasantville (1998) was only The Way Things Had Always Been to Boomers going through childhood; adults who had been paying attention lamented its sexual, intellectual, and cultural impoverishment compared to what came before
(1919-early) 1920s: the post-WWI Return to Normalcy. Major themes of semireligious utopianism and pacifism that had been common and somewhat challenging to wartime stance faded. The First Red Scare. The Palmer Raids rounding up leftists and deporting them to the new Soviet Union. The second KKK, Red Summer, and 2 years later the Tulsa Race Riot that Watchmen depicted, postwar Black ambition checked.
Now: well, Musk taking Twitter and deleftizing it definitely counts. Ellsworth Toohey, from Ayn Rand’s 1943 The Fountainhead was a maybe overdone portrait of a real tendency seen in period journalism of dismissively, sentimentally moralized leftism, that was part of what the '50s wiped away. The Asian split to the right in California, other minorities in general, whatever Black/Jewish shit is going on.
Some rightists think that pressing on queer stuff will work, I personally think that’s mistimed and they’ll lose that one like race in the 50s, in the process stigmatizing complaints about “pedophilia”. Covid and the fact that there’ll be appeals on behalf of the lonely and vulnerable to spend resources and control on protecting them that no government will be able to survive indulging and so will have to culturally pivot to normalize ignoring, ending the era since Clinton’s “feel your pain”.
(“The trigger warning social media” now is Mastodon, which mainstream media restorationists have been branding as “for hall monitors” so no one has to care about them)
There was this guy in secondary school who used to call me a dyke all the time until I had to ask him to stop and explained I was a guy. From then on he called me a faggot and used my correct pronouns all the time, and moved away at some point but I saw him at my uni today and the first thing he said to me was “Alex! You still a fag?”
I think that was his way of asking me my pronouns.
Huh, more people at the supermarket wearing masks than since it was everyone and there’s more pasta sold out than since 2020. That’s not a vote of confidence.
I mean it is Thanksgiving, maybe people are making a run on macaroni elbows for pasta salad
Cashier in a gaiter mask, though. That’s not a guy who’s been keeping up maximum protection all along… but now he’s doing something.
Yeah, adult infection showing up at higher than normal intensity this year too. And I don’t know that Democrats can bring back “public health” measures at the end of 2022 and then expect to win an election against Ron DeSantis in 2024
So looking at Twitter and active fronts of combat now include Covid-worriers vs. normie libs and… young unionization fans? While Mastodon is apparently schisming – and given its federated architecture that’s not hyperbole –between bluecheck journalists and… trans activists?
Like, I know I had predicted this year would see the online left start to fracture solidarity and fall into infighting, but that’s some Mad Libs shit right there
While back in meatspace Brooklyn is getting worked up with Black/Jewish tensions. Like, what?
So looking at Twitter and active fronts of combat now include Covid-worriers vs. normie libs and… young unionization fans? While Mastodon is apparently schisming – and given its federated architecture that’s not hyperbole –between bluecheck journalists and… trans activists?
Like, I know I had predicted this year would see the online left start to fracture solidarity and fall into infighting, but that’s some Mad Libs shit right there
So Twitter rebalancing for PvP and reinstating Trump and that Kara Swisher thread like… it’s Elon’s Carnegie library system, huh? Not run for revenue maximization but for charitable purpose of… preserving the old Internet Culture.
That's… fucking amazing. And I guess he’s the only person in the place such that he could do that. Like, going to Mars feh, even at max speed that’ll never matter in my lifetime but like, my god. That’s absolutely worth working yourself to death for.
Like, last decade when I was like “just stick in there, this wave’ll roll back” yeah, I derived that lesson from history, but let me assure you it doesn’t go this cleanly. Like, not even in half-mythical ancient history, maybe in legends.
Taking like everything since let’s say 2014, that was like a Super SSS EX++ stage clear. Oh, and plus for me at least, after confronting the fact that I am in fact attuned to the zeitgeist, and then the heimlich thing where I look death in the face and say “not today” using the exact skill set I had made a load-bearing part of my self-conception, I fell into a mystical slumber and awoke in every way perfected.
And all of this relies on things lining up so perfectly. Like, you needed the like, Incarnated Spirit of the 80s with the exact particular psychological issues to line up with the political system in the exact right way, and you needed the richest man in the world to have the exact-right Western-adjacent background and the exact right memefuck sensibility and the deal to line up the exact right way…
And meanwhile you needed a 100-year plague to show up at the exact right time, and for me with the exact right characteristics, and then I had to roll a crit on like, a d100000.
