The Culture War

[IdleRich]

i saw a girl walking with that exact sign at a protest in berlin last saturday, tbh i also thought it to be a dumb slogan.

Same in Lisbon... I didn't think much to it either. To be honest I think ninety percent of the slogans are pretty lame... there is something that really takes away from their power when they are longer than a few words and try and be clever.

 

[version]

Has there ever been a good protest sign/slogan?

 

[version]

A decent suggestion I heard yesterday was that protesters in the US should carry the flag and chant the last bit of the pledge of allegiance -- "... with liberty and justice for all" -- as it'd be difficult for the right to twist and any cops doing them dirty would look even worse.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Is it a good show in general?

it's alrite. the gangster stuff - that is, the plot - is considerably less interesting than the sociological bits

I think the pitch was something like "The Wire meets The Sopranos, set in the Roaring 20s", but it doesn't have the Dickensian insight of the former or the psychological insight of the latter, so it's a well-executed gangster show but nothing more

the ethnic, racial, class bits are interesting for a TV show. the complicated relationship of 2nd and beyond generation immigrants to the home country, internal discrimination, etc. issues among black people related to skin tone (and straightness of hair, nose width, etc) unfortunately continue to present day.

there's a scene iirc where a southern Italian immigrant gangster makes a solidarity appeal to Chalky white based on them both being darker than Nucky

 

[Mr. Tea]

Is it a good show in general? It's something I've considered giving a go, but can never really get excited enough about to bother.

I wouldn't put it in the same class as, say, Sopranos, but it's well worth a watch. Steve Buscemi is always quality and he's great in this. Edit: P's assessment is pretty fair.

Actually Sopranos is another show with some interesting angles on race. The main characters love nothing better than whining about how Italian-Americans are this poor persecuted minority (unfairly stereotyped as gangsters, perhaps?) - apart from their other great hobby, which is being massively racist towards Jews and blacks. (Cue Meadow, in her first year at college, getting her first serious boyfriend - who is half Jewish and half black - her "Hasidic homeboy", as her father Tony calls him.)

 

[Mr. Tea]

Has there ever been a good protest sign/slogan?

I reckon AM I NOT A MAN AND A BROTHER? is pretty good (allowing for the obvious genderedness of it).

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Has there ever been a good protest sign/slogan?

yeah but they're rare. it's hard to come up with snappy slogans. most people aren't poets.

protesting tbh is not a "cool" activity in general. it's earnest. the romantically dangerous moments are (usually) rare and when they do arrive, they're terrifying if you've never experienced them before. activism in general is grinding work with little reward, which is probably why - besides the need to make a living etc - people burn out on it so quickly.

 

[droid]

Solidarity is a real, living, breathing thing though. It burns through you. You also have occasional moments when you can feel history changing, the wold warping around you.

I remember an impromptu march a few days after Savita died. I think it was a Wednesday night, late autumn, maybe a few thousand people. Just after we crossed O'Connell bridge I noticed a disturbance ahead and as we moved closer I saw an old woman, clutching a rosary and bible, glancing around, looking confused and lost, the march parting around her and reforming. Symbolism was a bit OTT I guess but the message was clear.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Short answer, we beat the shit out of other minorities until we got promoted.

a purer case of capitalist divide and conquer you'd be hard-pressed to find

another, fictional, work dealing with this at a later point is the political roman a clef The Last Hurrah (probably up there with All The King's Men as great American political novels) about a very thinly fictionalized James Michael Curley - the great Irish political boss of Boston - and his final battles with both the Boston Brahmin WASPs and the coming of modernity.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Solidarity is a real, living, breathing thing though. It burns through you.

that is true. I also think that's why it's hard to understand for people who've never felt it.

 

[Leo]

Are racism and the culture war the same thing? I was under the impression it was broader than that and also included stuff like religion and opposition to LGBTQ people.

yeah, "culture wars" is much broader than just racism, although does encompass it in many cases. conservatives fighting again cancel culture on college campuses is part of the culture wars, as is the fight against abortion, LGBTQ rights, religion, gun ownership, wearing face masks, etc.

 

[WashYourHands]

Isn’t part of the open carry, pro gun brigade essentially trying to immanentize the eschaton? One area where Europeans and 2nd Amendment hysteria don’t have direct transaction points, other than these weird cos-play types stood around flaunting weaponry at civic centres. Looks threatening and that’s clearly one of the objectives. Some Boogaloo aspects seem to transcend race, aka a true American patriot would defend all gun rights bs regardless of ethnicity.

Some theatres overlap across the Atlantic, others don’t.

 

[version]

I've got a bellingcat thing on Boogaloo bookmarked, but haven't gotten round to it yet.

The Boogaloo Movement Is Not What You Think - bellingcat

Translations:English (UK)Русский (Россия)On May 26th, crowds gathered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, to protest the death of 46-year-old George Floyd at the hands of the city’s police department. Floyd was black. Many of the protesters were people of color. The department fired four policemen that...

www.bellingcat.com

 

[WashYourHands]

Weird times.

 

[pattycakes_]

No shit

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

Isn’t part of the open carry, pro gun brigade essentially trying to immanentize the eschaton?

traditionally it's usually had millenarian sentiment - impending societal collapse, possibly accompanied (or precipitated) by race war

the 90s militia movement - a direct precursor, minus the 4chan shitposting vibes - was heavily pre-millenial dread - new world order, black helicopters, etc

sometimes the millenarianism is literal, i.e. things like Christian Identity

it's hard to place boogaloo in these lineages - I'm halfway through that bellingcat piece and it's already deep into a black hole of trying to suss out meaning from 4chan, memes and FB shitposting. the paranoid style in American politics is nothing new - it is omnipresent - but it's never been drenched in irony before. obviously that's a product of Internet, meme, and specifically 4chan culture. it makes everything slippery and ambiguous, in what was already a world of tangled symbology and beliefs. because it's so ambiguous, there are probably a wide rang of views (including some racist, if not all) under the boogaloo umbrella. I'd guess that to some degree it's for the lolz but no one - including (maybe especially) participants - could tell you what degree is, exactly.

what I do know is - if you have people dressed up in tactical gear carrying rifles (even if some portion are just realistic-looking paintball guns) around on the street in tense situations with crowds and cops, sooner or later there will be shooting

also - the great confusion surrounding all this is perfect cover for organized, directed paramilitary violence, as I keep going on about - should anyone want to make that happen

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

one that bothers me is the idea of a 2nd civil war, even as a meme based on Breakin' 2, because there's some real feeling underlying that

how the fuck would that work, geographically, demographically, etc?

the actual Civil War was fought by two geographically delineated sides over a single, clear issue (and was by far the most traumatic even in American history)

this would be what - not race war, so they say. so, tactical bros + popular uprising v the govt? that's a total non-starter. liberals vs conservatives, whatever that means, in a culture war turned shooting war?

the serious/not-serious Civil War 2 meme lends it all this incredibly surreal vibe

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

because at the same time it's all memes and lolz, it's also deadly serious, sometimes in the same breath

I know someone who got doxxed by far-right types last year. from what I understand it is, predictably, a crazy nightmare.

 

[padraig (u.s.)]

and then you inevitably get people not versed in the 4chan/FB culture who see it and take it all dead seriously, which is probably happening now

the same way you eventually get from the shock rock of Venom to corpsepainted Norwegian teenagers burning churches and stabbing each other

only that transition from irony to serious happens infinitely faster now

 

[version]

one that bothers me is the idea of a 2nd civil war, even as a meme based on Breakin' 2, because there's some real feeling underlying that

how the fuck would that work, geographically, demographically, etc?

the actual Civil War was fought by two geographically delineated sides over a single, clear issue (and was by far the most traumatic even in American history)

this would be what - not race war, so they say. so, tactical bros + popular uprising v the govt? that's a total non-starter. liberals vs conservatives, whatever that means, in a culture war turned shooting war?

the serious/not-serious Civil War 2 meme lends it all this incredibly surreal vibe

Yeah, I read recently - although I can't remember what or where - that what it would actually look like would be a protracted domestic terror campaign.