Politics is Downstream From Culture
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I just reread George Orwell's '1984' and the novel is scarier than ever
I told you so.
That’s what George Orwell would say if he could visit our world, 75 years after he wrote his final novel, "1984."
Orwell sought to demonstrate the dangers not just of totalitarianism but of a world where words lose their meaning. Many of the terms he coined for the novel have since entered common discourse -- "thought police," "Big Brother," "doublethink," and the "memory hole," to name a few. And of course the adjective "Orwellian" comes to us because of this book. All of them point to the loss of our most precious freedom -- freedom of thought. And unfortunately, that’s where we as a society appear to be headed today.
The setting for "1984" is a dysfunctional, decaying London torn apart after the "atomic wars" of the 1950s and 1960s reshaped the planet into just three primary nation-states. Oceania (London and the West) remains in a permanent state of war, sometimes with Eastasia, sometimes with Eurasia. It doesn’t really matter, as long as there’s an external enemy to hate.
Another Country Bans ‘Barbie’ Over ‘Damaging Morals’
The government informed the local distributor MD Ciné and leading cinemas that the film was being pulled for “damaging morals,” according to the private news site 24H Algérie, which was first to report the ban, the outlet noted.
The move comes after Kuwait announced on August 9 that the Greta Gerwig-directed feminist fantasy and the supernatural horror film “Talk to Me” was banned in the country to protect “public ethics and social traditions,” according to Reuters.
The chairman of Kuwait’s film censorship committee, Lafi Al-Subaie, accused “Barbie” of “carrying ideas that encourage unacceptable behavior and distort society’s values,” local media outlets reported.
‘Snow White’s’ Rachel Zegler Needs A Lesson From The Little Women School Of Being A Female Role Model
Zegler’s “progressive” take is actually regressive, mirroring trends that negatively impact marital stability and social cohesion. She fails to see the value in a reality many women do live and many women do find fulfilling. Zegler and those who share her beliefs could benefit from listening to the classics rather than jumping to critique them, starting with Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women.
Jo March, like Zegler, is strong-headed, talented, and ambitious — and paralleling these qualities is her disdain for a traditional trajectory. Jo is incredibly resistant to the institution of marriage, saying, “I’m happy as I am, and love my liberty too well to be in a hurry to give it up for any mortal man.” Her rejection of what is classically feminine mirrors Zegler’s comments.
The Left Ruins Everything: Now They're Cancelling Classic Rock
Rock music has always been about tweaking the establishment. From the early rock & roll days, musicians have specialized in sticking it to the man. That’s all well and good when the man is a buttoned-down square with traditional values, but when the woke becomes the establishment — you kids had better turn that music off.
We’ve already seen the left go after authors, films, and TV shows, but that’s not all. Now the wokescolds are going after classic rock music. It all started when Universal Records added Queen’s “Greatest Hits” album to the library for Yoto, a new entertainment platform aimed at a youth audience.
“Queen’s greatest hits are now available!” crows the Yoto website. Only it’s not true because one of Queen’s biggest smashes is missing. Universal left “Fat Bottomed Girls” off the Greatest Hits album on the Yoto platform.
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Adding to the controversy is that there’s no clear explanation for why the song is missing. After all, “Fat Bottomed Girls” is a tribute to those ladies with a little junk in the trunk. What about body positivity? I thought we were supposed to celebrate the obese for being their true and brave selves.
Granted, this is an entertainment platform for kids, but it should be up to parents to determine whether their kids should listen to “Fat Bottomed Girls,” a song whose lyrics are likely to go over most kids’ heads. We conservatives believe that parents ought to have a hand in their kids’ education, and the same principle applies to their entertainment.
Let’s also not forget that the wokes are the ones who rail against “book banning” while canceling or selectively editing all sorts of media. To throw leftists’ rhetoric right back in their faces, why is Yoto banning “Fat Bottomed Girls”?
What’s going on with these viral, right-wing country music hits?
Right-wing Billboard breakout Oliver Anthony and the conservative country boom, explained.
Rather, these artists all arguably charted at least in part because they — purposely or not — tapped the vein of conservative resentment that has fueled numerous other consumerist movements this year. From the backlash against Target and Budweiser over their queer and trans-friendly marketing, to the viral push to promote the anti-human trafficking film Sound of Freedom and its QAnon-adjacent rhetoric, each of these campaigns has arisen out of conservative disgruntlement with the mainstream, a feeling of being ostracized and marginalized. The motivation to “fight back” against the evils of liberal morality increasingly involves wielding individual purchasing power as a way to make a collective statement. Boycotting and promotion have worked in equal measure throughout 2023 for conservatives; both have yielded results.
Now, that consumerist mentality has found new subjects: Wallen, Aldean, and Anthony — with other, more unapologetically far-right artists, waiting in the wings.
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Oliver Anthony brings QAnon bugbears and overt welfare fat-shaming to bluegrass YouTube
As difficult as it is to claim that Aldean’s song is not racist, many have tried — including Aldean himself, who claimed that it was about “the feeling of community” and the desire for a return to “a sense of normalcy.” Even though in practice that logic falls apart, it clearly has its appeal to a particular audience. Across his burgeoning repertoire, Oliver Anthony’s lyrics voice a similar rhetoric — the idea that he is “an old soul” trapped in “a new world.” The new world, Anthony heavily implies, is indolent, hypocritical, and oppressive. Although Anthony has achieved massive popularity in a short time for the blunt, angry edge of these lyrics, they mask a much deeper, uglier type of ideology.
“Rich Men” has drawn over 30 million views in the week since YouTube user radiowv, Anthony’s co-manager, uploaded an acoustic performance of it. In it, Anthony strums a guitar and wails impassioned lyrics with familiar country themes about the plight of the working-class man who suffers at the expense of the “rich men north of Richmond.”
Anthony’s articulation of these themes — the working man is overworked, overtaxed, and exploited — has won him a huge outpouring of praise from the audiences that have flocked to stream the song since its release. In between these more universalized themes, however, is a jarring and discordant resentment directed at people on welfare, with all of the embedded racism that implies. “Lord, we got folks in the street, ain’t got nothin’ to eat / And the obese milkin’ welfare,” Anthony sings. “Well, God, if you’re 5-foot-3 and you’re 300 pounds / Taxes ought not to pay for your bags of Fudge Rounds.”
Conservatives have long rallied around demonizing the welfare state. One reason for that is that even though white people receive more public assistance than Black people, many conservatives view welfare as a system set up to help urban Black families. And although research has repeatedly shown that welfare recipients work no less and often work more while on welfare, conservatives often view those families as undeserving grifters living off federal funds instead of helping themselves. The term “welfare queen,” for example, frequently gets used as a racist dog whistle. In 1970, the one-hit country wonder “Welfare Cadilac” [sic] drew criticism as “disgustingly racist” when it hit the charts.
Anthony’s abrupt shift from rich men to fat-shaming welfare recipients makes it very difficult to read the song in its entirety as merely a populist working-class anthem. There’s also a muddy reference to Jeffrey Epstein’s island estate, a line that seems to position Anthony as QAnon-adjacent; he also appears to be a proponent of antisemitic conspiracies about 9/11.
As an unknown folk singer from West Virginia, Anthony — who’s purported to be a high-school drop-out living in a $750 camper, writing music while struggling with his mental health — had no real music industry experience. His manager runs the tiny West Virginia YouTube channel where his songs were first uploaded. In a YouTube video uploaded alongside the release of his songs, Anthony describes himself as a political centrist.
His songs, nonetheless, have been championed by many prominent conservatives, including several writers for Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, and multiple established musical artists such as former Mumford and Sons member Winston Marshall. Despite myriad accusations that Anthony’s virality has been manufactured by music industry conservatives and right-wing extremists, it appears, per reporting by the New York Times, that Anthony’s song went viral organically — or at least, not because of paid industry manipulation. Instead, fans of the song utilized longstanding chart-gaming tactics codified by K-pop fans and other pop music stans, like buying the song and all of Anthony’s other offerings via iTunes in order to increase their Billboard ranks. The song was also streamed over 17 million times in its first week alone.
But the audiences for Anthony’s music and the average K-pop band share very little overlap. Instead, we seem to be witnessing a new arena for gamified conservative rancor.
Why Young Americans Are Not Taught about Evil
Most of our schools teach almost nothing of importance, and nothing is more important than the study of good and evil. In the United States today, nearly all schools, from elementary through graduate, concentrate on teaching about racism, sexism, preferred pronouns, homophobia, transphobia, LGBTQIA+, climate change, diversity, equity, inclusiveness and white guilt. In other words, most of our educational institutions, including the most prestigious, do not educate.
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When it comes to evil, the ignorance is enormous, often almost total. For example, according to Pew, about half of Americans ages 18-39 cannot identify Auschwitz or any other Nazi death camp. And there is every reason to assume that much fewer than half could identify the Gulag Archipelago (20 million-plus murdered); the Ukrainian forced famine (5 to 6 million murdered in a little over a year); Mao's Great Leap Forward (about 60 million murdered); or Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge (about one in every four Cambodians murdered).
As noted, almost no one outside of Russia has ever heard of the Russian Civil War, let alone knows anything about it. One reason is that the winners, the communists, had no desire that people know about it. Yet, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, about 10 million people, the great majority noncombatants, were killed.
Why don't students know about evil?
The first reason is that nearly all the genocides of the 20th century were committed by communists, and the Left, which runs virtually all educational institutions, has always had a soft spot for communism. If people were to recognize that communism has been the greatest source of evil in the modern age in terms of numbers murdered, number of lives destroyed, liberty stolen, and the sheer amount of human suffering inflicted (greater by those metrics than those of the Nazis before they were forcibly stopped), the Left would lose much of its appeal.
Another reason is the foolish notion that people are basically good. This has been a left-wing belief since the French Enlightenment leader Jean-Jacques Rousseau came up with the idea. As he wrote in his book, "On Philosophy, Morality, and Religion," "Man is a naturally good being, loving justice and order; there is no natural perversity in the human heart... All the vices imputed to the human heart are not natural to it."
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A third reason follows from the second. With the exception of the mass murder of the Armenians (which was committed by Muslim Turks), the genocides and the other horrors of the 20th century were committed by secular regimes. Given the centrality of secularism to leftism, this fact has been kept from young people. Likewise, the fact that all these genocides were committed by big governments is not taught to young people because big government is also central to left-wing ideology. In other words, a true depiction of the evils of the 20th century would mean the end of the two pillars of left-wing ideology: secularism and big government.
If you want to make a more moral world, you must begin with the study of evil. But, for the reasons enumerated here, the Left is not -- and cannot be -- interested in fighting real evil. So, the Left fights made-up evils: American systemic racism, transphobia, capitalism, carbon emissions, sexism and former President Donald Trump, to name a few.
Celebs want to complain about the average pay, let this rich snobs pool their money together and give all the support staff .... these 100 million dollar earners can afford to break off a few Mill and SHARE THE WEALTH
Clem72
Well-Known Member
This is why I can't get into K-Pop Bands and Blacksploitation films. Not enough white representation. /s