Quotulatiousness

April 22, 2023

QotD: The yawning vaccuum that used to be “white culture”

Filed under: Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Current Year White people are not allowed to have a culture. Any culture. Hence, in a perverse way, hipsterism.

First: I think we can agree that there’s no such thing as a black hipster, or a Latino hipster, or an Asian hipster. What would be the point? Those groups already have a culture, in both the “personal identity” and “grievance group” sense. […]

The 1990s were the last time there was some common ground. Growing up as I did in the Tech Boom South, I saw it firsthand. It was just accepted that your Hispanic (not “Latino”, and certainly not “LatinX”) friends would have certain cultural specific things they’d have to do from time to time. If you were friends, they might invite you. If they were good friends, they wouldn’t invite you (do not, under any circumstances, go to your buddy’s sister’s quinceañera. You will meet a whole bunch of hot, horny young Mexican nubiles. You will also meet their brothers and fathers and cousins and uncles and etc., so you will spend the whole evening running around like a homo, doing everything in your power not to talk to girls. It’s torture*).

Same thing with the Chinese kids, and the Indian kids, and all the rest. You’d never see your Asian buddies on Friday nights, because that’s when they had Chinese school (yes, of course their parents would schedule something academic on a Friday night). Diwali was cool, because your friends’ moms would make those crazy-sweet Indian desserts and send you a care package (also known as “diabetes in a box”). That was just an accepted part of life, the same way those guys wouldn’t start a pickup basketball game until after 10 on a Sunday morning, because they knew we’d be in church. Nobody thought much of it, in the same way all our moms just kinda learned by osmosis to keep tortilla chips and salsa in the cupboard as an all-purpose snack (no worries about anyone’s religious food prohibitions).

This worked, because there was still enough of a monoculture back then — this is the late 1980s / early 1990s — to provide common ground. Alas, as White culture disintegrated, the other guys started subsuming their cultural identities into their grievance group identities: The Chinese kids were worried about being called “bananas” (yellow on the outside, White on the inside); the Indian kids were ABCDs (American-Born Confused Desis); and so on. And the White kids were the most anti-White of all, since they’d gone to college for a semester or two and had learned how to parrot pop-Marxism (technically, pop-Gramscianism and pop-Frankfurt School-ism and pop-Marcuse, but who’s counting?).

Thinking back on it, those were the ostentatious “slackers”; the real “Grunge” kids — White kids who found their own Whiteness “problematic” (a phrase debuting in egghead circles around that time). I always assumed it was a problem with traditional, cock-rocking masculinity — not least because that’s what all the male “Grunge” rock stars said it was — but in retrospect I think it was a rising problem with Whiteness itself. Maybe all the grievance groups had a point, and maybe they didn’t, but either way the dominant Boomer culture sucks, so what else can you do?

I know how naive that must sound now, but 30 years ago …

    * It wasn’t my buddy’s fault. He warned me. But c’mon, man — his mom invited me. We’d spent the whole summer working together on his dad’s landscaping crew; I practically lived at their house. What was I gonna say, no? Looking back on it, Mrs. Rodriguez was either trying to set me up with her daughter, or was Aztec goddess-level sadistic.

Severian, “To Mock It, It Must Exist”, Founding Questions, 2022-12-29.

September 22, 2021

QotD: Urban bohemians

Filed under: Books, Economics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[C]onsider the inchoate American gang identified as “Bohemian” in New York Times rock critic Ann Powers’ new book, Weird Like Me: My Bohemian America. Powers casually links rock music with her version of bohemia, that world of young and not-so-young hipsters living and behaving in nontraditional ways. Rock, she writes, “inspires fans to dye their hair green and wear thigh-high leather boots; to defy their parents, skip school, and tell off the boss; or even, sometimes, to take a new turn and change their lives completely.” Her bohemia is inexorably linked with progressive politics, not holding down a decent job, being kind to gays and minorities, and all else that’s “cool.”

Powers fails to recognize that her bohemia is predicated upon a market liberalism that throws off so much wealth that you can live like a Pharaoh just by scavenging what other people throw out — as she and her slacker buddies did in San Francisco in the ’80s and early ’90s. Her bohemian lifestyle is part of the same system that underwrites free markets, consumerism, and tolerance for all sorts of offensive speech and alternative lifestyles. In other words, the liberty to be bohemian is a glorious result of the very capitalist reality that Powers says a real bohemian must be against.

Brian Doherty, “Rage On: The strange politics of millionaire rock stars”, Reason Online, 2000-10.

Update: Broken link fixed, thanks to “somercet1” for the heads-up.

July 31, 2021

QotD: The dangers of “hipster fuckery” in the craft beer business

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The words “hype”, “fad” and “trend” were bandied about. As was my absolute favourite, “hipster fuckery”. What’s hipster fuckery, you ask? According to its utterer, it is the completely unnecessary addition of whimsical ingredients and brewing techniques, especially piled on top of each other. You’re left with a beer that is fighting itself.

Hipster fuckery is a great way to alienate potential craft beer fans.

So how about we all just agree to be innovative as hell, but stop well short of hipster fuckery? Excellent! But, umm, where is that line exactly?

Rebecca Whyman, “Beer gimmicks, pretentious nonsense and other hipster fuckery”, The Growler: Ontario Craft Beer Guide, Volume 1, Issue 3, 2018.

March 12, 2021

QotD: The modern university campus

Filed under: Education, Food, Humour, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

If you haven’t been on campus lately, visit your local citadel of learning. Don’t just drive through; spend some time there. On the surface, things look lovely — ivy covered walls, dorms like 5 star hotels, trendy boutiques selling stuff you can’t afford to buy, undergraduates wearing more than your week’s take-home pay. Light poles and store walls are covered with flyers for causes only the very wealthy and very idle could possibly care about. In short, it’s heaven …

… but pretty soon you’ll notice that it’s a very battered, grimy sort of heaven. Nobody’s from there, nobody stays there, everyone’s just passing through on the way to something better. Certainly including the faculty: Every single professor not currently at Harvard thinks knows xzhe deserves to be at Harvard, and will get there someday. Everything’s on-demand in a college town, because everything’s rented. That “distressed” look hipsters love so much isn’t an affectation on campus; it’s a logical outcome of the transient lifestyle. Why fix a pothole, paint a building, trim a tree, teach a class anyone could ever actually use? Anyone who complains will be gone next semester anyway.

Get yours before it’s gone, and if that means skipping town one day ahead of the bill collectors, remember: Capitalism is evil.

It’s not just campus, either. The rest of the lifestyle is just as evanescent, just as ugly. Think of the food. Whatever you do, you can’t eat what the Normals eat, drink what the Normals drink. Here again, foodie culture isn’t a hipster affectation on campus. It’s deadly serious status-jockeying with your temporary — always temporary — peers. You’ve got to win now, because next semester they’ll be gone, probably to Harvard, those cheating, ass-kissing bastards. Sure, it looks, smells, and tastes like cold dog puke, but at least you’re the first to eat it!

Severian, “Politics for Fugly People”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2018-08-24.

November 18, 2018

Ironically, Pabst may be forced to start brewing its own beers

Filed under: Business, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 03:00

I’ve never had a PBR, so maybe all those hipster poseurs really do like the stuff, but their favourite ironic drink may be in danger, as Pabst is suing MillerCoors to force them to keep brewing the stuff for Pabst:

A Wisconsin courtroom was the setting this week for a lawsuit pitting some of the biggest names in watery American beer against each other. The case pits “hipster favorite” Pabst, parent of PBR, against the much larger MillerCoors, which Pabst claims wants “to put it out of business.”

Earlier this year, Pabst sued MillerCoors, alleging MillerCoors has engaged in “breach of contract, breach of anti-competition laws, fraud, and misrepresentation.” The companies’ currently have an agreement in which MillerCoors brews Pabst’s beer brands. That agreement is about to end, and MillerCoors seems ambivalent about renewing the contract. Pabst has asked the Wisconsin court to award it $400 million in damages and to force MillerCoors to renew the contract.

The case, which is being heard in state court in Milwaukee, could decide the future of Pabst’s entire portfolio of beers, from PBR to Old Milwaukee, Lone Star, Old Style, Colt 45, Natty Bo, Rainier, Schlitz, Olympia, Stroh’s, Schaefer, Schmidt’s, Pearl, and Blatz.

MillerCoors brews Pabst’s beers under a 1999 contract—a type of agreement known in the industry as contract brewing—that is set to expire in 2020. That contract contemplated two potential five-year renewals. MillerCoors argues the company should be free to determine whether to renew the contract, while Pabst alleges “that the two need to find a solution together if Pabst wants to continue the agreement.” Pabst also insists MillerCoors has a good-faith obligation to negotiate a renewal.

MillerCoors hasn’t foreclosed on continuing its partnership with Pabst. For example, it’s considered selling its Irwindale, California, facility to Pabst, or continuing to brew Pabst’s beers there at a much higher cost.

Pabst insists the only way the company can continue to exist is if MillerCoors, which is owned by Molson Coors, continues to produce its beers under contract at a cost Pabst finds fair. That may be true. Pabst doesn’t brew beer, and AB InBev, which owns industry leader Budweiser and which is likely the only other brewer large enough to produce the full Pabst line, forswears the contract-brewing model.

As Tim Worstall put it earlier this week: “Basically, and not accurately, Pabst books the advertising space and MillerCoors does everything else. And given that it’s the brand bit of brewing that makes the money, not the brewing bit, why would you continue such an arrangement if you didn’t have to?”

As Iowahawk put it, “Oh cripes when will I ever learn not to trigger the Beer Snobs”:

April 25, 2017

Cultural appropriation of “poverty culture” in the Tiny House Movement

Filed under: Media, Randomness, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ann Althouse linked to this older article by July Westhale on “Poverty Appropriation”:

How many folks, I wonder, who have engaged in the Tiny House Movement have ever actually lived in a tiny, mobile place? Because what those who can afford homes call “living light,” poor folks call “gratitude for what we’ve got.”

And it’s not just the Tiny House Movement that incites my discontent. From dumpster diving to trailer-themed bars to haute cuisine in the form of poor-household staples, it’s become trendy for those with money to appropriate the poverty lifestyle — and it troubles me for one simple reason. Choice.

The Tiny House Movement began in the ’90s, but has only been rising in popularity since the recession. And to be fair, it’s rooted in a very real problem: more and more people being displaced as a result of soaring housing costs, especially in tech-boom areas like the Bay Area.

[…]

It’s likely, from where I sit, that this back-to-nature and boxed-up simplicity is not being marketed to people like me, who come from simplicity and heightened knowledge of poverty, but to people who have not wanted for creature comforts. For them to try on, glamorize, identify with.

Such appropriation isn’t limited to the Tiny House trend, or even to the idea of simplicity. In major cities, people who come from high-income backgrounds flock to bars and restaurants that both appropriate, and mock, low-income communities. Perhaps the most egregious example is San Francisco’s Butter Bar, a trendy outpost that prides itself on being a true-blue, trailer park-themed bar, serving up the best in “trashy” cuisine and cocktails. With tater tots, microwaved food, and deep-fried Twinkies on the menu, the bar also serves cocktails that contain cheap ingredients, such as Welch’s grape soda. The bar has an actual trailer inside, and serves cans in paper bags, so that bar flies can have a paid-for experience of being what the owners of this bar think of when they think of trailer trash.

Butter Bar in San Francisco (Credit: Facebook)

It’s but one example of an entire hipster movement — can it be called a movement when it’s a subculture rooted not in political consciousness, but in capitalism? — that has brought with it an ethos of poor-culture appropriation and the “re-invention” of things that have largely been tools of survival for poor, disabled, working class, and/or communities of color for decades.

April 17, 2015

QotD: Bitterness about bitterness

Filed under: Food, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

And if I may insert a personal plea: could the bittermongers please knock it off with the sneers? Somehow, in the collective cocktail consciousness of America’s hipsters, “bitter” has become synonymous with “sophisticated”. Bitter beer is good beer, bitter cocktails are good cocktails, and the louts who like things thin or sweet deserve what they get, which is everyone else at the bar struggling to conceal their bemused smile. Yet there are many of us who hate, hate, hate bitter flavors not because we haven’t been exposed to them, nor because we’re unadventurous slobs who would really rather be hooked up to a glucose IV. Personally, I find bitter flavors like Campari so strong that even a sip is on the verge of being physically aversive, as if you were punching me in the tongue. That’s not a matter of sophistication, but a matter of personal chemistry. There are people who can taste bitter compounds in broccoli and soapy-tasting substances in cilantro that make it completely unpalatable, while the rest of us dig into our veggies and say they don’t know what they’re missing. In fact, we’ve got it exactly backwards: we don’t know what we’re missing — and we’re moralizing our deficits.

Megan McArdle, “Dinner, With a Side of Self-Righteousness”, Bloomberg View, 2015-03-27.

October 21, 2014

QotD: Hipster economics

Filed under: Economics, Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Hipster economics are standard economics because hipsters are everything the US economy has ever wished for in one convenient package. It’s a group consisting largely of young, upper-middle class people with very little conviction, who will spend large amounts of money to maintain their own comfort and the appearance of diversity and rebellion. They are activists as long as it’s easy, poor as long as it doesn’t involve dirt or hunger, and selfless as long as they don’t stand to lose anything. They represent the sanitizing of national issues so that they can be discussed without being addressed. And all you have to do to control them is use some reverse psychology. They’re not rebels, they’re not even malicious, because they’re not anything except a bunch of kids playing pretend. They’ll eventually grow up and become bankers, lawyers and politicians, just like their parents…

“Robert” commenting on “The peril of hipster economics: When urban decay becomes a set piece to be remodelled or romanticised“, by Sarah Kendzior, 2014-05-28.

April 23, 2014

LibreSSL website – “This page scientifically designed to annoy web hipsters”

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:24

Julian Sanchez linked to this Ars Technica piece on a new fork of OpenSSL:

OpenBSD founder Theo de Raadt has created a fork of OpenSSL, the widely used open source cryptographic software library that contained the notorious Heartbleed security vulnerability.

OpenSSL has suffered from a lack of funding and code contributions despite being used in websites and products by many of the world’s biggest and richest corporations.

The decision to fork OpenSSL is bound to be controversial given that OpenSSL powers hundreds of thousands of Web servers. When asked why he wanted to start over instead of helping to make OpenSSL better, de Raadt said the existing code is too much of a mess.

“Our group removed half of the OpenSSL source tree in a week. It was discarded leftovers,” de Raadt told Ars in an e-mail. “The Open Source model depends [on] people being able to read the code. It depends on clarity. That is not a clear code base, because their community does not appear to care about clarity. Obviously, when such cruft builds up, there is a cultural gap. I did not make this decision… in our larger development group, it made itself.”

The LibreSSL code base is on OpenBSD.org, and the project is supported financially by the OpenBSD Foundation and OpenBSD Project. LibreSSL has a bare bones website that is intentionally unappealing.

“This page scientifically designed to annoy web hipsters,” the site says. “Donate now to stop the Comic Sans and Blink Tags.” In explaining the decision to fork, the site links to a YouTube video of a cover of the Twisted Sister song “We’re not gonna take it.”

February 17, 2014

QotD: Not a hipster

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:33

I listen to the strangest assortment of music.

No, I’m not trying to tell you I’m a hipster, bustin’ a moby at the table saw while only listening to totally deck obscure artisanal free-range amazeballs beats. That would be so midtown. I just find myself interested in odd things.

Sippican Cottage, “I Like Puddles Pity Party’s Early Stuff. You Probably Haven’t Heard Of Them”, Sippican Cottage, 2014-02-16

January 2, 2014

John and Sherlock

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:26

The first episode of Sherlock season three was aired in the UK yesterday. On this side of the pond, we won’t get to see it until later in the year, so we have to rely on media reaction to the show, and Tim Stanley wasn’t over-pleased with the producers’ efforts, calling it a “roller-coaster ride” that “leaves you confused and nauseous”:

Holmes has always been a wonder, but here he is wondrous to the point of smug and irritating. How can Watson love him? Presumably because they are such good friends and one of Sherlock‘s strong points is the genuine chemistry between Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch. But even this comes with an irritating postmodern twist. Everyone presumes they’re gay. Because of course if two men spend more than five minutes in each other’s company they’re obviously candidates for some Brokeback-style hot cowboy action in a tent.

One of the saddest things about our culture is the death of brotherhood. Watch any of the pre-Millennium Sherlocks and you’ll be in no doubt that these men would take a bullet for one another. In the excellent Murder By Decree, Christopher Plummer and James Mason’s heroes are so tender that they share a blanket on a carriage ride — Sherlock gently tucking Watson in. When Vasily Livanov’s Holmes “dies” in the Russian version of The Final Problem, Vitaly Solomin’s Watson collapses against a tree and weeps uncontrollably. But no one ever questions their sexual preference. There’s no need to. They’re just friends.

By contrast, contemporary British culture has become so pornified and sex-obsessed that the running gag in Sherlock is that everyone thinks Cumberbatch and Freeman are in a civil partnership. Don’t get me wrong — I’m sure there’s an enjoyable version of Holmes yet to be written in which they’re at it like knives. But the constant snickering that goes on in Sherlock just adds to a sense of the show’s lack of maturity. It’s knowing, clever-clever, hip, ironic, tech-obsessed, geeky, hipster and just about everything else that gets in the way of a sophisticated yarn well told. For that, you have to go back to the Jeremy Brett Sherlock, which was distinctly lacking in action but high on good prose. Most episodes were an hour of Jeremy sitting in the gloom in Baker Street complaining that he’s got nothing to do. Compulsive viewing.

November 21, 2013

How Obama lost young voters

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:46

Nick Gillespie looks at the remarkable way Barack Obama transitioned from cool to square for one of his key supporting demographic groups:

Back in 2008, Barack Obama seemed like the coolest cat to hit the national scene in a long time, almost scientifically engineered to appeal to idealistic young Americans. He was the perfect combination of a dream dad and an older brother who could run you ragged up and down the basketball court, wink and nod about smoking dope, and hip you to some older but still cool music, you know? In 2008, the Pravda of youth culture, Rolling Stone, slathered the future president with praise for being so with it that he even knew how to use…an iPod. We were all pretty sure that his eventual Republican challenger, John McCain, had stopped listening to music when Rudy Vallee went electric or Stephen Foster released his Chris Gaines record or something, but there Obama was, listening to Bob Dylan, Yo-Yo Ma, Sheryl Crow, and even Jay-Z. “I have pretty eclectic tastes,” Obama told Rolling Stone. He even went on to invoke “Maggie’s Farm,” Dylan’s classic song of generational defiance and opting out. “It speaks to me as I listen to some of the political rhetoric,” explained.

Yeah, well, it’s all over now baby blue. Like Bush before him — and in many wars, even worse than Bush before him — Obama has personified the failure of leaders to speak plainly, honestly and directly and to enact simple, effective, financially responsible policies that speak to Americans’ hopes and dreams. The great political continuity in the 21st century is one of transpartisan failure and the continuing flight from party affiliation by more and more Americans.

Beinart and others like him are right to note that Obama’s and the Democrats’ decline in popularity is not automatically the Republicans’ gain (though get a load of this: Ken Cuccinelli won the 18-24 year-old vote against Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia governor’s race). But just as there’s no reason to expect the problems with Obamacare to be fixed anytime soon, there’s no reason to think that youth disaffection with the president is going to get better over the remainder of his second term. He’s failed with younger voters not in spite of his policies but because of them. Along the way, he transmogrified from a hipster dad into a near-total drag whose control is as absolute as his inability to get anything right.

In terms of basic demographics, the future belongs to Millennials because they are young. For good and ill, they will inherit the world their elders made for them. In terms of politics, the future belongs to leaders and parties who not only agree with the record-high percentage of Americans who think the government has too much power but actually propose to give some of it away.

October 3, 2011

Occupy Wall Street activists fail to persuade

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:12

Brendan O’Neill says that the “teenage moralism” of the protesters makes him “ashamed to be Left-wing”:

Occupy Wall Street, the gathering of angry actors, graphic designers and various other hipsters in the financial districts of New York City, might just be the most degenerate Left-wing movement of recent times. Its weird demands, plastered across tongue-in-cheek placards and on super-cool, self-pressed t- shirts, capture the descent of the modern Left into the cesspool of victimology, conspiracy-mongering and disdain for mass society and its allegedly dumb inhabitants. Far from representing anything that I, a Leftie, would recognise as progressive and humane, this gaggle of rich kids spouts little more than snobbery and fear, seemingly incapable of deciding whom they loathe the most: greedy fat bankers or the dumb fat public.

Occupy Wall Street claims to be a mass workers’ movement, but it’s nothing of the sort. It is in fact a tiny, self-selected group of self-righteous, mostly middle-class activists who have failed to win over large sections of the American public to their “cause” — which isn’t surprising when you consider that on the rare occasion that these trendy banker-bashers talk about the American public, they do so with a metaphorical peg on their snouts. An article on the Occupy Wall Street website claims “the working class in this country has been brainwashed by MSM, Fox News and the Right-wing propaganda machine”. It says everyday Americans, being stupid, do not understand what socialism is, because “they have been emotionally brainwashed against it”. And so it falls to the cool, fashionable, oh-so-enlightened activists of Occupy Wall Street to help “de-programme people against the brainwashing they’ve experienced”. That is, the oiks must be re-educated by the hipsters. The little people must have their minds cleaned out by their moral and fashion superiors. Occupy Wall Street mashes together the outlook of Kim Jong-Il with the politics of Susan Sarandon, giving rise to a weirdly hippyish yet authoritarian gathering of slackers-cum-elitists.

November 29, 2010

Winter fashion conscious? Here’s a site for you

Filed under: Europe, Randomness — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:23

By way of Tim Harford’s Twitter feed, a blog devoted to what the current street fashion is in Helsinki:

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