Comments
On that mass shooting at a massage parlor/ prostitution din
The initial stories about mass shootings are almost always wrong. Columbine had very little to do with bullying and social outcasts. The Orlando shooter likely wasn’t targeting gay men. The Virginia Tech shooting had just about nothing to do with “gun culture.” The list goes on.
A couple of years from now, after the killer has been convicted and sentenced, we’re going to find out that this whole thing was more complicated, more tragic, and more weird than we could possibly imagine. By that point, no one will notice.
And if men have a tendency to shoot sex workers and if sex workers in some areas are predominantly Asian, than do we just get to say, well, no racism here, individual or systematic?
And if it is just a normal example of misogyny, well perhaps a country where garden variety misogynists pick up guns and kill large numbers of people may be a problem? Perhaps?
you go the the Young’s Asian Massage to shoot workers, it is not just by chance that the workers shot will be predominantly Asian. If you go to shooting at places that you have been to before and know that the workers are predominantly Asian, then it is not by chance that the people you shoot are predominantly Asian. If on the other hand you shoot sex workers at random you might expect a less biased sample. That this crime has a racial component suffers from obviousness.
That may be true but it speaks directly to a number of issues. (1) Why are massage parlors primarily Asian (and going beyond what you said, usually Korean, Chinese, or Thai); (2) why assume the women are “trafficked†or even what “trafficked†would mean in that case. If the women were advanced the money to travel to the US and find a place to live, and also someone provided them with their visa with the expectation they would “work†the advance off, is that truly “trafficking.†How is that different from bringing a Polish carpenter to Chicago with the expectation he repay his debt working as a carpenter for a non union firm? There is a built in assumption to most discussions of sex work that sex workers are trafficked, which is belied just by reading on line discussions among sex workers. But more importantly (3) Sex work is illegal in Georgia, why were these businesses still operating. Is it because Police turn the other way because Asian businesses are clean and discrete? There are no obvious ties to Italian mafia or Mexican cartels? Or Black gangs?
Is the real issue here, unspoken in any accounts of the murders, is that the police as a matter of course look the other way and allow Asian massage parlors to operate because they are Asian? Illegal sex work in Asian Massage parlors is normalized because the sex workers are an Asian other. What if the massage parlors were Russian? Irish? Polish? Mexican? Or what if they were religiously divided? Roman Catholic? Methodist?
It is good of you to point out that the Asian hate crime angle is wrong—and that the Southern Baptist angle is more wrong. But I am more disturbed by how the sex work aspects are glossed over and themselves the product of what can be called “racial†assumptions.
To blame this crime on “racism” is to absolve our society, and ourselves, of any culpability in allowing these types of “massage” parlors to exist, and to deny the corrosive effect that prostitution, sorry, “sex work,” has on men, let alone women. It also denies the feedback loop of cause and effect that the sexes have on each other. Looking at this crime honestly would result in all the narratives of the sexual revolution and “equality” of the sexes to come tumbling down. We’d have to admit that prostitution is not empowering to women, it enslaves both women and men, in different ways. We’d have to admit that the “Asian fetish” mentioned often in news reports of this crime extends to the communities that look the other way at Asian-owned massage parlors out of an exoticized view of Asian culture’s supposed enlightened take on sexuality.
on polling showing conservative fatalism and justifying it.
I will say that I personally feel that the conservative approach to all social changes, which is to run away (“take your kids out of school and homeschool them!” “get out of the cities and move to the exurbs/the Sun Belt!”) really needs to end, and if conservatives are thinking instead that it’s time to start staying put and facing things, that’s a good thing. But I’ll believe it when I see it.
Those types of surveys are very problematic. People get that they’re being asked, Would you like the results of this poll to show that people think everything’s OK, or would you like it to show that people have a problem with the way things are going? And so they tick the “problem†box, even if the wording doesn’t fully or accurately describe their views.
Questions like that aren’t really designed to further understanding of public opinion; they are designed to give Ezra Klein, David Brooks, et al. a hook for their columns. In their small way they contribute to the reductionism and divisions they purport to record.
Ya Brooks seems to have completely forgotten what happened 4 years ago. After Trump was elected California was supposedly going to succeed they were so pissed off about the world. We heard over and over, in fact we STILL hear about, how Trump and Trumpers were destroying the nation (you know that 47% that voted Trump). I have a friend who played in a military band, and he said after they played for Trump’s inauguration half of these grown men and women wept like babies about it.
This is nothing other than a reflection of the truly divided state of the nation. We now have so little in common that huge portions of society won’t accept as legitimate the other side being in power.
The starbucks down the street got firebombed when I was a kid too (ineffectually as always). Obviously this had nothing to do with Trump since it preceded his election by 20 years. It has been part of Portland culture for all my lifetime for the local anarchists to throw poor functioning molotov cocktails at corporate retailers. Think of it as our version of the running of the bulls for our disaffected and pampered youth. Unfortunately Trump’s election led to a lot of fearful liberals becoming more accepting of this behavior (since they were sure fascism was coming). Trump’s surge reinforced this.
I used to wash dishes at a restaurant that cattered to upper middle class people.And i got a lot of flack from a few customers who found out that i had not voted for Clinton in 2016[ I hadnt voted for Trump either that year.But the customers were still angry at me] And i couldn thelp but think how skilled many of America’s corporate and politcal leaders are. They had managed to convince these customers[ who were also my neighbors] that the biggest threat to America wasnt Big Tech monopolies, nor was it Wall Street greed and incompentence.No! The biggest threat to America was the dishwasher at thier local bar/ restaurant , who sometimes voted Republican
Wall Street and much of corporate America has managed to convince millions of Americans that the biggest threat to America are men and women in rural Ohio who work in places like Walmart.Just because some of those people voted for Trump
Tolkien had no hesitation about “The Return of the King” being a positive good. One king rightwise born of the good blood ending the anarchic division among multiple jurisdictions and bringing an expanded, restored empire under his wise and benevolent rule. Such kings, of course, are only found in literature, epic or novel. That’s why we have to be careful about entrusting anyone with too much power. But its not cut and dried. All power isn’t the ring of Sauron, and all well-meaning, inspiring leaders in real life are not Aragorn.
The hobbits and men in fact did fight their enemies instead of viewing battle as ipso facto illegitimate and once they had emerged victorious set up kingdoms full of beauty instead of viewing rule as ipso facto illegitimate. Tolkein’s point, I believe, was that by seeking power above all else to destroy the evil enemy one is liable to themself become evil, functionally equivalent to the enemy. He was not making the argument that men should ‘turn the other cheek’ and accept the rule of Sauron, Saruman and Orcs instead of resisting nobly and forcefully asserting the primacy of the good (of which a part is that power is not an end in itself and must be used judiciously). This defeatist impulse is what I was criticizing.
The Soviet legacy actually has had some lasting cultural impacts- people in the former Soviet Union tend to be more skeptical of markets and capitalism than people in the western countries.
And how much of that is the old peasant suspicions of city slickers looking to cheat them. IMO, Russia started out well-primed for Marxism.
My grandpa was a cop in Detroit then. The stories he told me led me to the conclusion that drinking didn’t actually decline. It just became less measurable. Pretty much the whole criminal justice system was staffed by opponents of Prohibition from beat cops to judges, so enforcement was minimal and statistics unreliable. He used to bootleg hard liquor across the river from Canada, not for sale, just for personal use, and some of his colleagues would make home brew from ingredients bought at the grocery store or directly from local farmers. I suppose some good came out of the demise of saloon culture, given that all-male drinking parties in homes would end when the host’s wife shooed everybody out where a bartender had motivation to keep his customers drinking as long as possible, but I don’t think it balances out the great expansion in organized crime. Tommy guns could be bought by mail order then, no background checks, no ID, no nuthin’. The big city bootlegger gangs used them in their turf wars, with little concern for the safety of bystanders. It was the bystander casualty rate in these turf wars that led to the first demands for gun control.
Prohibition also closed down the saloon by opening up the speakeasy. The old-time American saloon was a white male affair; the men who frequented it were mostly what we would now call Anglo-American, with a liberal sprinkling of Scots-Irish; foreigners were not particularly welcome and the Germans and Italians had their own places of resort. The saloon was a white, male, nativist safe-space, and a woman couldn’t enter it without risking her reputation. The speakeasy was entirely different. Women were received with open arms; foreigners were plentiful; POCs were evident; everything had changed. The change was indubitably effected by Prohibition, of that there can be no question; but I’m not sure that you, Stari Momak, would have cared for it had you been living in those days; in fact, I’m not sure that you like it even now.
You’re telescoping a lot of time here. The literatures of the classical era did indeed survive well into the fifth century largely intact. The monasteries received many of their libraries as donations from wealthy Christians in Gaul and Italy. The classical curriculum survived well into the Christian Era, both in the Latin West and the Greek East. It was Justinian’s attempt to reunite Italy forcibly to the Empire that finally broke the back of Late Roman civilization in Italy, and not the fifth century Germanic incursions.
If your thesis is that writings disapproved by Christians were allowed to molder away, what explains the survival of Catullus? Or indeed of any pagan writing? It wasn’t just hidden away, forgotten until Petrarch came along and uncovered it a thousand years later, although that’s the popular image based on his discovery of Cicero’s letters. No. Christians then were more urbane than their image among modern Western seculars would have you believe.
I reject the idea that there was wholesale censorship of the classical canon. I DO believe there was censorship of rival “Gnostic†writings, though. But that would have occurred largely in the Greek east.
The question isn’t “can I flourish within mainstream society” but “can my subculture survive living within this society.” You have to be able to differentiate between a fight for the soul of society at large that isn’t winnable by political means, and fights for what your faith specifically needs to exist as a healthy surviving subculture. The latter goal is still very achievable in American and that’s the reason not to turn to burning it all down or to despair.
what we commonly call “Western Civilization†most everything intellectual can be traced back to old Plato and his realm of (capital “Iâ€) Ideas. And again I say that in the most negative way possible.
And we are and have been none the better for it. And we’ll never find a real way out of the mess we’ve been in for centuries until we deal with Plato and put him in his rightful place: in the dustbin of the history of ideas.
Just for laughs, I started browsing and window-shopping at some progressive fashion stores, in
the Seattle area, that not only sold men’s clothing and women’s apparel, but also had separate sections for “gender fluid,” “nonbinary,” and “genderqueer” textiles.
Ignorantly, I assumed that the men’s section would sell, for instance, pants, the women’s section skirts, the gender fluid section culottes, the nonbinary section skorts, and the genderqueer section scooters, or something like that. I was dead wrong.
The women’s section sold all of the above items and was bigger than the other four sections combined. The men’s section (so as not to alienate the stores cis customers) not only sold typical menswear, but avoided anything even remotely feminine like a bad case of the plague. And the other three sections all sold long pants, shirts, neckties, t-shirts covering the elbows, shorts covering the knees, and other stuff identical to the men’s section—only of A THINNER MATERIAL and MORE BODY-CONTOURED than the “menswear.” Palazzo pants, leggings, capris, yoga pants, etc., were strictly for cis women.
Seriously, Mr. Dreher, when was the last time that your wife/sister/daughter wore a skirt? This is simply the next logical step in casting womanhood as a “step down” from not only manhood, but even from ANDROGYNY, under the flimsy pretense of “equality.” I agree with you 100% that nobody under 18 must get tattooed, pierced, or any other body mutilation. This, however, does not address the elephant in the room—viz., that “girly” has now become a synonym for “weak,” as opposed to one for “beautiful.”