“between Trayvon Martin’s murder and George Floyd”
A) A jury decided that Trayvon Martin was killed in justifiable self-defense, he wasn't murdered.
B) As bookends, Akil picks the deaths of two blacks that didn't involve other blacks. Between those two events, eight years apart, how many thousands of blacks were killed by other blacks? Did that make her feel like she was screaming in a vacuum?
It depends. The manner of death would still be homicide. It's just that self defense is an accepted affirmative defense against a charge of murder. So just because no one was convicted doesn't mean the man wasn't murdered.
But yeah I get what you mean. I assume she just disagrees with the judgement.
Bailey: Murder is the premeditated, villainous act that the Bad Guy commits on "Law & Order." Racism is a typical motive.
Motte: Actually, "murder" is a nuanced term that can only be understood in the context of varied state laws, so it could hardly be used to demonize a person involved in a death where evil intent was absent.
Yes, if we assume that the speaker knew the subtle legal distinction between murder and homicide, then she is wrong. Although, still anyone is entitled to disagree with a verdict. I'm sure we on this board do it all the time.
Thinking more, given there are degrees of murder which do not include evil intent, she might be okay anyway.
I don't think it's a "subtle legal distinction" between murder and homicide. You might get the death penalty for the former and, depending on the situation, a commendation for the latter. If she had said "the killing of Trayvon Martin," that would have been correct, even if the killing was justified.
I get what you're saying, but to the average person the two words are interchangeable. It's like how almost no one uses the word vagina to mean vagina (a claim that a hungarian doctor colleague laughed at me for asserting but it's been all over TV for decades since).
And how many whites were killed by blacks, with none of the names of those whites remembered. VDARE used to do a monthly report on whites killed by blacks, there were around 30 each month---all of them "local stories".
I'm no lawyer. But could West Virginia just void any reciprocal legal agreement with New York? Just tell Letitia James to stick it and give legal protection to VDare. Tell Letitia James that West Virginia will never extradite the Brimelows. Peter Brimelow's problem is that he incorporated VDare in New York before the state became a lawless Third World dominion.
I rarely see art for its own sake anymore. Everything is either Narrative or slop, or Narrative slop. I have a theory that top gun Maverick was the last honest to God movie release
Everyone else is crowing about it, but the vibe shift seems hollow and paper thin to me. There is no indication that the moderates have regained prestige and control over the radical vanguard in the progressive movement, no attempt at intellectual course-correction, reconsideration, reformulation. The most one sees is a few attempts to quietly change the subject and focus on less-agitating agendas like abundance or whatever. It's more like when the members of a gang or spy network decide to lay low and go to ground as sleepers while the heat is on and just wait it out until things cool down and it's safe to get back to business as usual. They aren't deciding to give up the mission or getting second thoughts about their life of crime, nothing has shifted, they are just biding their time until the pendulum inevitably swings back.
Agreed. I don’t know what the lefties expect. The Romanians refused to let the most popular candidate on the ballot. The Germans have declared AfD to be a terrorist organization. The Irish managed to keep the populists out of government for another term.
In the UK, Nigel Farage’s Reform party is sweeping all before it and the establishment is shi**ing razor blades as a result
I don’t think the will of every European population is going to stay repressed forever. 1968 is going to be defeated the hard way or the easy way.
Edited to add: LePen was convicted on some BS charge to keep her off the ballot in France.
American politics are in a weird phase. Lots of latinos and blacks actually like Trump and his Sailer 2.0 strategy: black and latino men with steady jobs desperately trying to boost their kids into bourgeois living don't like being lectured by liberal women about non-binary sexuality and transfer payments.
Blacks have a single motherhood rate of 65%. Hispanics have a rate of 42%. What makes anyone think that black and Hispanic men care about their children or are motivated by such issues.
I don't think a 'vibe shift' is possible in pop culture and the arts. Woke ideology and white guilt is too entrenched and is essentially became a religion to many creatives within that sphere. They don't even seem to care about making money, just pushing their message.
Unless they were all replaced by moderates, the arts will permanently be stuck in the 2016 era, as evidenced by what is still being put out on Netflix each week.
Nevermind the vibe shift or the political winds of 2020-2025, it doesn't matter who's Prez or who controls Congress when it comes to American culture—which I would call a monoculture, but that's a massive understatement. Stalinist Russia and Calvin's Geneva allowed a greater range of voices and works than does modern America.
I went to art school back in the ancient 80s (!) and nothing has changed, except maybe the ideological groupthink and punitive moralism have been dialed up to 11.
What if we make the Founding Fathers black? How bout a gay Jesus making out with the disciples? Or a nun masturbating w a crucifix? Or an installation of used tampons to highlight the injustice of women menstruating when men don't have to? etc etc ad infinitum
Something broke in the post-60s liberal imagination and nothing else matters except kicking the corpse of the White Supremacist Patriarchy and proclaiming your stunning and brave liberation from the hated social norms that were crafted entirely to chain down the precious omnivorous Self and all its needs and fantasies—even if all these norms died before you were born.
This is a fundamentalist faith and there is simply no way to have any type of career in any of the arts without publicly spouting its dogma and sharing its manias.
I hope to live long enough to witness a time in America when being an "artist" doesn't mean parading stale political opinions or a suffering identity in place of actual art, skill, vision, imagination etc—but time is running out and it's nowhere on the horizon.
As you say, there really has been nothing new in Big Art for decades -- and maybe, in some fields, in a century, since Duchamp did the urinal.
No matter where you go, if there's a 'Museum of Modern Art', you pretty much know exactly what you're going to get.
Hong Kong has just spent a bazillion dollars building an enormous new modern art museum, in its quest to retain its status as a 'world city'. I guess these days you do what you gotta do when you're playing that game, but the building and its contents are -- unsurprisingly -- boring.
Are you practicing your artistic calling these days?
I used to blame Duchamp for dealing the death blow to art and leading the palace coup of eunuchs we call "Theorists", but his paintings are too beautiful for me to hate him and besides he was French and they seem to have this desperate need to make juvenile gestures to show how un-bourgeois they are, it might just be the foundation of their entire post-Revolution culture. Now I save all my scorn for frauds like Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono and Keith Haring, who will leave behind nothing but stenciled T-shirts and totebags for posterity. All these empty reflexive gestures were pretty hardened by the '80s, but once AIDS blew thru the art world it solidified, sanctified and commercialized the "Artist as Stigmatized Sufferer" trope. Now instead of Schools we have diagnoses, like neuro-divergent poet/actress lol.
My "art school" was actually one of those snooty liberal arts colleges where everyone I knew majored in either Film, Photog, Lit or Drama. I was in Lit so I also faced the full brunt of the Parisian Theory explosion, but at least my relative skill allows me stay home and stroke my goatee in private and do fun things like comment on Steve Sailer's Substack.
There's been nothing new in the ancient media of painting and sculpture. That isn't surprising. Most of this woke stuff is just sucking the marrow out of old corpses, the big corporations, the old arts forms- books, paintings, sculpture.
I comfort myself by simply assuming that the good stuff, the current innovation, is just going on where my presbyopia prevents me from seeing it.
In the early 1980s when I was attending college in Chicago my advisor's admin was a 50ish black woman. She was one of the bravest people I ever met (and I knew WWII veterans with Silver Stars and DSCs). I really liked her and we used to spend much time shooting the bull while I ate sweets that she had made. Just before I left Chicago I heard she had rescued her 12 year old son from being pressed into a gang by taking him to her sister's house in rural Michigan. When she returned, the gang banger who had tried to recruit the kid, was so angry that he shot here 3 times. This did not kill her but left her paralyzed (I don't know if she ever recovered fully). When I visited her in the hospital, I was pretty shocked at her condition. I remember asking her "Did you think they would shoot you?" Her answer was something like "I thought they might, but it was my grandson."
Why can't they make a movie about someone like her?
A remake of 'Forever' is wholly unnecessary for our time, but all the more unnecessary when race swapped.
When I read it in junior high, early 2000's it still retained much of its shock and lessons. However, (and not to be cruel,) it kinda only worked cause she was a white girl with a future and a good family. Her choice to have sex was a really big decision. It still rang true for me and my peers. A black girl having sex in her teens wasn't a shocking choice, it was an inevitably, then as it is now.
Netflix must’ve paid Judy Bloome a boatload to consent to turn her classic into an all black cast.
Thank goodness Bloome’s predecessor, the late great Beverly Cleary won’t have to be put into that situation.
Something tells me, though, that if Brock Akil approached Beverly to adapt one of her classic young adult novels by changing the ethnicities as well as the era, that she wouldn’t have any of it.
Judy Blume, a self-described liberal Democrat, probably felt, probably correctly, that she could not say no to a black woman who wanted to turn her novel's cast all black.
This is one of the many costs of being a liberal Democrat, along with the requirement that you destroy your country, though older libs usually manage to die before the consequences of that come to fruition.
And perhaps for this very reason, historian David McCullough seldom ever publicly commented on current events, politics, etc. to this day, little is known to the public what his personal private thoughts on politics were. Granted, apparently he didn't think much of Donald Trump in 2016, but for the most part, he shied away from directly commenting on politics, preferring to stick to his field of expertise, namely, American History. Thus McCullough preserved his legacy on both sides of the aisle and moving forward will remain one of the few US historians who wasn't seen as blatantly partisan (e.g. Howard Zinn, etc).
An old friend of mine used to try to extend jokes. The group of us would have a big laugh and we'd riff for a while until things naturally petered out. But this one friend would keep trying to revive the dying joke. The joke would be finished and he'd still be riffing on it and giving a fake, hearty laugh and so on. It was quite sad to watch. It seemed like he felt a great need. A hopeless need for connection or something. Anyhow when I talk to some of these cultural people I get the same feeling. Like, it's done. It's time to move on.
The conclusion is they are playing safe because they expect progressives to take over somewhere between 2026 and 2028. What we now have may later be remembered as something akin to New Economic Plan (NEP) time in the history of Russian Communism.
> "The new cultural products of May 2025 still reflect the eternal verities of May 2020"
Well, the Met (Metropolitan Museum of Art to non-NYers, largest, most visited art museum in the Western hemisphere) recently hosted an unprecedented retrospective of Caspar David Friedrich, who codes rightwing among online cognoscenti, but the aloof Met curators may not have known that.
Technically, Friedrich (d. 1840) is not a "new cultural product", but his work may be new to those outside Europe.
P.S. I used past tense, but I just checked and the Met exhibit runs 48 more hours . . .
“between Trayvon Martin’s murder and George Floyd”
A) A jury decided that Trayvon Martin was killed in justifiable self-defense, he wasn't murdered.
B) As bookends, Akil picks the deaths of two blacks that didn't involve other blacks. Between those two events, eight years apart, how many thousands of blacks were killed by other blacks? Did that make her feel like she was screaming in a vacuum?
It depends. The manner of death would still be homicide. It's just that self defense is an accepted affirmative defense against a charge of murder. So just because no one was convicted doesn't mean the man wasn't murdered.
But yeah I get what you mean. I assume she just disagrees with the judgement.
Bailey: Murder is the premeditated, villainous act that the Bad Guy commits on "Law & Order." Racism is a typical motive.
Motte: Actually, "murder" is a nuanced term that can only be understood in the context of varied state laws, so it could hardly be used to demonize a person involved in a death where evil intent was absent.
Yes, if we assume that the speaker knew the subtle legal distinction between murder and homicide, then she is wrong. Although, still anyone is entitled to disagree with a verdict. I'm sure we on this board do it all the time.
Thinking more, given there are degrees of murder which do not include evil intent, she might be okay anyway.
I don't think it's a "subtle legal distinction" between murder and homicide. You might get the death penalty for the former and, depending on the situation, a commendation for the latter. If she had said "the killing of Trayvon Martin," that would have been correct, even if the killing was justified.
I get what you're saying, but to the average person the two words are interchangeable. It's like how almost no one uses the word vagina to mean vagina (a claim that a hungarian doctor colleague laughed at me for asserting but it's been all over TV for decades since).
And how many whites were killed by blacks, with none of the names of those whites remembered. VDARE used to do a monthly report on whites killed by blacks, there were around 30 each month---all of them "local stories".
> "how many whites were killed by blacks"
More than one a day. Certainly hundreds per year, probably above a thousand or two. But the Establishment prefers you don't know.
https://national-conservative.com/extremist-files/interracial-homicides-database/
https://www.unz.com/isteve/minneapolis-professor-explains-to-jurors-why-somalis-are-just-like-19th-century-norwegians/#comment-6600853
https://www.unz.com/isteve/nyt-black-bystander-shoots-white-man-republicans-to-blame/#comment-6577533
America needs VDare back. Is there anything the Trump Administration or the Governor of West Virginia or the Attorney-General of West Virginia can do?
The Feds are trying to shut down Letitia James, but the NY State gov't isn't interested in stopping her.
Not only is NY not interested in stopping her, it's going to pay the legal bills she will incur for her criminal activities.
I'm no lawyer. But could West Virginia just void any reciprocal legal agreement with New York? Just tell Letitia James to stick it and give legal protection to VDare. Tell Letitia James that West Virginia will never extradite the Brimelows. Peter Brimelow's problem is that he incorporated VDare in New York before the state became a lawless Third World dominion.
I rarely see art for its own sake anymore. Everything is either Narrative or slop, or Narrative slop. I have a theory that top gun Maverick was the last honest to God movie release
Agree. Although I did like the latest 'Midway'.
By 'Narrative" you mean 'the narrative"?
Until we get a black George Washington, they are not done.
Not even then!
Everyone else is crowing about it, but the vibe shift seems hollow and paper thin to me. There is no indication that the moderates have regained prestige and control over the radical vanguard in the progressive movement, no attempt at intellectual course-correction, reconsideration, reformulation. The most one sees is a few attempts to quietly change the subject and focus on less-agitating agendas like abundance or whatever. It's more like when the members of a gang or spy network decide to lay low and go to ground as sleepers while the heat is on and just wait it out until things cool down and it's safe to get back to business as usual. They aren't deciding to give up the mission or getting second thoughts about their life of crime, nothing has shifted, they are just biding their time until the pendulum inevitably swings back.
Agreed. I don’t know what the lefties expect. The Romanians refused to let the most popular candidate on the ballot. The Germans have declared AfD to be a terrorist organization. The Irish managed to keep the populists out of government for another term.
In the UK, Nigel Farage’s Reform party is sweeping all before it and the establishment is shi**ing razor blades as a result
I don’t think the will of every European population is going to stay repressed forever. 1968 is going to be defeated the hard way or the easy way.
Edited to add: LePen was convicted on some BS charge to keep her off the ballot in France.
I don’t have a good feel for American race politics but in Canada the left “progressive wing” is as bad as ever.
Progs aren’t going away.
American politics are in a weird phase. Lots of latinos and blacks actually like Trump and his Sailer 2.0 strategy: black and latino men with steady jobs desperately trying to boost their kids into bourgeois living don't like being lectured by liberal women about non-binary sexuality and transfer payments.
Yes I’ve read about that.
Blacks have a single motherhood rate of 65%. Hispanics have a rate of 42%. What makes anyone think that black and Hispanic men care about their children or are motivated by such issues.
Enough to move the dial to Trump in the swing States.
Look the data up to back up one's point.
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-black-voters-gains-results-1982939
https://www.as-coa.org/articles/how-latinos-voted-2024-us-presidential-election
I don't think a 'vibe shift' is possible in pop culture and the arts. Woke ideology and white guilt is too entrenched and is essentially became a religion to many creatives within that sphere. They don't even seem to care about making money, just pushing their message.
Unless they were all replaced by moderates, the arts will permanently be stuck in the 2016 era, as evidenced by what is still being put out on Netflix each week.
And they will cease to be art
Are You There God? It's Me, LaQuavios.
Laughed out loud
lololol
I genuinely laughed out loud. Thank you!
Vote for one of best SS sub stack comments.
Nevermind the vibe shift or the political winds of 2020-2025, it doesn't matter who's Prez or who controls Congress when it comes to American culture—which I would call a monoculture, but that's a massive understatement. Stalinist Russia and Calvin's Geneva allowed a greater range of voices and works than does modern America.
I went to art school back in the ancient 80s (!) and nothing has changed, except maybe the ideological groupthink and punitive moralism have been dialed up to 11.
What if we make the Founding Fathers black? How bout a gay Jesus making out with the disciples? Or a nun masturbating w a crucifix? Or an installation of used tampons to highlight the injustice of women menstruating when men don't have to? etc etc ad infinitum
Something broke in the post-60s liberal imagination and nothing else matters except kicking the corpse of the White Supremacist Patriarchy and proclaiming your stunning and brave liberation from the hated social norms that were crafted entirely to chain down the precious omnivorous Self and all its needs and fantasies—even if all these norms died before you were born.
This is a fundamentalist faith and there is simply no way to have any type of career in any of the arts without publicly spouting its dogma and sharing its manias.
I hope to live long enough to witness a time in America when being an "artist" doesn't mean parading stale political opinions or a suffering identity in place of actual art, skill, vision, imagination etc—but time is running out and it's nowhere on the horizon.
Thanks; this is so well-stated.
As you say, there really has been nothing new in Big Art for decades -- and maybe, in some fields, in a century, since Duchamp did the urinal.
No matter where you go, if there's a 'Museum of Modern Art', you pretty much know exactly what you're going to get.
Hong Kong has just spent a bazillion dollars building an enormous new modern art museum, in its quest to retain its status as a 'world city'. I guess these days you do what you gotta do when you're playing that game, but the building and its contents are -- unsurprisingly -- boring.
Are you practicing your artistic calling these days?
I used to blame Duchamp for dealing the death blow to art and leading the palace coup of eunuchs we call "Theorists", but his paintings are too beautiful for me to hate him and besides he was French and they seem to have this desperate need to make juvenile gestures to show how un-bourgeois they are, it might just be the foundation of their entire post-Revolution culture. Now I save all my scorn for frauds like Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono and Keith Haring, who will leave behind nothing but stenciled T-shirts and totebags for posterity. All these empty reflexive gestures were pretty hardened by the '80s, but once AIDS blew thru the art world it solidified, sanctified and commercialized the "Artist as Stigmatized Sufferer" trope. Now instead of Schools we have diagnoses, like neuro-divergent poet/actress lol.
My "art school" was actually one of those snooty liberal arts colleges where everyone I knew majored in either Film, Photog, Lit or Drama. I was in Lit so I also faced the full brunt of the Parisian Theory explosion, but at least my relative skill allows me stay home and stroke my goatee in private and do fun things like comment on Steve Sailer's Substack.
Cheers
There's been nothing new in the ancient media of painting and sculpture. That isn't surprising. Most of this woke stuff is just sucking the marrow out of old corpses, the big corporations, the old arts forms- books, paintings, sculpture.
I comfort myself by simply assuming that the good stuff, the current innovation, is just going on where my presbyopia prevents me from seeing it.
Alas, yes indeed.
In the early 1980s when I was attending college in Chicago my advisor's admin was a 50ish black woman. She was one of the bravest people I ever met (and I knew WWII veterans with Silver Stars and DSCs). I really liked her and we used to spend much time shooting the bull while I ate sweets that she had made. Just before I left Chicago I heard she had rescued her 12 year old son from being pressed into a gang by taking him to her sister's house in rural Michigan. When she returned, the gang banger who had tried to recruit the kid, was so angry that he shot here 3 times. This did not kill her but left her paralyzed (I don't know if she ever recovered fully). When I visited her in the hospital, I was pretty shocked at her condition. I remember asking her "Did you think they would shoot you?" Her answer was something like "I thought they might, but it was my grandson."
Why can't they make a movie about someone like her?
That's horrifying
That is awful and a plausible movie. I will also note, that she sent her grandson one state over (wisely skipping Indiana) not to a different country.
Wait, was it her son or grandson? If grandson, what happened to her daughter (son?)?
A remake of 'Forever' is wholly unnecessary for our time, but all the more unnecessary when race swapped.
When I read it in junior high, early 2000's it still retained much of its shock and lessons. However, (and not to be cruel,) it kinda only worked cause she was a white girl with a future and a good family. Her choice to have sex was a really big decision. It still rang true for me and my peers. A black girl having sex in her teens wasn't a shocking choice, it was an inevitably, then as it is now.
Arts and entertainment will be the last bastions of credentialism.
Netflix must’ve paid Judy Bloome a boatload to consent to turn her classic into an all black cast.
Thank goodness Bloome’s predecessor, the late great Beverly Cleary won’t have to be put into that situation.
Something tells me, though, that if Brock Akil approached Beverly to adapt one of her classic young adult novels by changing the ethnicities as well as the era, that she wouldn’t have any of it.
Judy Blume, a self-described liberal Democrat, probably felt, probably correctly, that she could not say no to a black woman who wanted to turn her novel's cast all black.
This is one of the many costs of being a liberal Democrat, along with the requirement that you destroy your country, though older libs usually manage to die before the consequences of that come to fruition.
And perhaps for this very reason, historian David McCullough seldom ever publicly commented on current events, politics, etc. to this day, little is known to the public what his personal private thoughts on politics were. Granted, apparently he didn't think much of Donald Trump in 2016, but for the most part, he shied away from directly commenting on politics, preferring to stick to his field of expertise, namely, American History. Thus McCullough preserved his legacy on both sides of the aisle and moving forward will remain one of the few US historians who wasn't seen as blatantly partisan (e.g. Howard Zinn, etc).
An old friend of mine used to try to extend jokes. The group of us would have a big laugh and we'd riff for a while until things naturally petered out. But this one friend would keep trying to revive the dying joke. The joke would be finished and he'd still be riffing on it and giving a fake, hearty laugh and so on. It was quite sad to watch. It seemed like he felt a great need. A hopeless need for connection or something. Anyhow when I talk to some of these cultural people I get the same feeling. Like, it's done. It's time to move on.
The conclusion is they are playing safe because they expect progressives to take over somewhere between 2026 and 2028. What we now have may later be remembered as something akin to New Economic Plan (NEP) time in the history of Russian Communism.
> "The new cultural products of May 2025 still reflect the eternal verities of May 2020"
Well, the Met (Metropolitan Museum of Art to non-NYers, largest, most visited art museum in the Western hemisphere) recently hosted an unprecedented retrospective of Caspar David Friedrich, who codes rightwing among online cognoscenti, but the aloof Met curators may not have known that.
Technically, Friedrich (d. 1840) is not a "new cultural product", but his work may be new to those outside Europe.
P.S. I used past tense, but I just checked and the Met exhibit runs 48 more hours . . .
The co-founder of Netflix was Marc Bernays Randolph.
Relative of Edward Bernays ( who founded modern advertising and wrote a book called 'Propaganda') and also Segmund Freud.
> "To them, it will always be late May 2020 forever."
Well, at least that makes a change from it being January 1933 forever, the last date the Culture Ministers were permanently stuck on...
I'm no lawyer, but was Trayvon Martin and George Floyd "murdered?" Not to quibble.