Well, I was wrong. I thought that Heartiste would be the first Manospherian to come to the defense of fallen Fox News hero Cliven Bundy. Nope. Turns out it was W. F. Price of The Spearhead, who blamed Bundy’s fall from grace not on his crude racism but on the fact that the white rancher with the guns and unpaid bills … talks too much like a black person.
No, really.
Here’s Price’s argument, such as it is:
What I find highly ironic about the recent condemnation of Cliven Bundy is that he is being pilloried for speaking more like black Americans than urban whites. Even his name would sound black if you made a slight change from “Cliven” to “Clayvon.”
Well, no. Bundy talks a lot more like, well, a cowboy-hat-wearing white rancher at war with the government than he does a “black American” – as if all “black Americans” talk alike.
And are you really arguing that his name “would sound black” if it were a different name?
Mr. Bundy’s American English is so archaic that he still uses “Negro” (also used more by blacks than whites) and says “they was able to” and “didn’t get no more.”
And this is supposed to be how “American blacks” all talk? Phrases like these are common in various Southern/rural dialects spoken by more “American whites” than “American blacks.”
Hell, they’re common amongst a lot of urban whites. I lived in Chicago during the years in which our mayor was a fellow named Richard M. Daley, a man with what you might best describe as a casual sense of grammar. I’m pretty sure he’s never figured out the difference between “was” and “were.”
Also, if you read the complete transcript of Bundy’s remarks, you’ll see that he also referred to blacks as “colored people.” That particular usage isn’t very popular with anyone but white racists.
The content of Bundy’s message, which wouldn’t have been all that controversial if spoken by a black preacher, was deemed hateful partly because he didn’t say it in the proper, coastal elite way.
Well, no, it was “deemed hateful” because he suggested, among other things, that he was some kind of expert on “the Negro” because he once drove past a housing project. He also posited that these Negroes “abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never, they never learned how to pick cotton.” And that they might have been “better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things.”
And then, in a move reminiscent of his magical transformation of “Cliven” to “Clayvon,” Price provides “translations” of Bundy’s remarks into what he thinks would have been more acceptable “newspeak.”
He thus proves conclusively that if Clayvon Bundy had said something different than what he actually said, without the word “Negro” and all those obnoxious references to “picking cotton,” it wouldn’t have been quite as obviously offensive as what he actually said.
Though it still would have been pretty fucking racist.
Here, for example, is one of Bundy’s remarks, untranslated:
Are they happier now under this government subsidy system than they were when they were slaves, and they was able to have their family structure together, and the chickens and garden, and the people had something to do?
Here’s Price’s “translation.”
How can one say that the federal government serves African Americans any better than plantation owners under slavery, when at least they had families and the opportunity to work the land under that system.
Really? Regardless of how it’s worded, that’s an odious and ignorant argument. Slavery made stable family life impossible for slaves. For many years, slaves were forbidden to marry, and even after they were allowed to marry, couples were often separated from one another, living and working on different plantations; children could be sold to plantations apart from their parents. Slaveowners raped slave women and girls and enslaved the children born from these rapes.
It’s really kind of hard to have a decent family life when SOMEONE ELSE OWNS YOU AND YOUR SPOUSE AND YOUR CHILDREN. Or, even worse, several different someone elses.
Oh, but these days single black women sometimes raise children on their own. And living in big cities they don’t have the wonderful opportunities to garden that their enslaved ancestors had.
Price later seems to suggest that Bundy may be less racist than white New Yorkers in part because he doesn’t have to deal with black people as much:
In fact, Bundy, who probably has little if any negative interaction with black folks may be more positively inclined toward them than the New Yorker.
Apparently, in Price’s world, white racism is caused by interacting with black people. The more contact white people have with blacks, the more they hate blacks! Who knew? Maybe this whole “desegregation” thing was a horrible mistake!
In the comments, DruidV wins himself some upvotes by declaring that:
Bundy has the guts to say what a lot of critical thinking Americans have been thinking for over 150 years now. Namely: which form of slavery made American blacks happier.
After all, you didn’t see them running around gunning each other down (along with lots of police and innocents) while hopped up on crack or “lean” or whatever illicit drugs, pre Union war of aggression.
Laguna Beach Fogey, meanwhile, declares that “there’s something admirable about Bundy.”
And minor Manosphere celebrity The Fifth Horeseman, with some sadness, writes that
Cliven Bundy is a metaphor for the self-reliant, small government America being displaced by the big government, feminist, obese America.
The end of an era both inspiring and natural, into a sordid, misandric, obese one.
I’m not quite sure how obesity fits into all this, but evidently Mr. Fifth Horseman here hasn’t noticed that Bundy is himself, well, obese. Hell, his belly is even bigger than mine. He’s not being displaced by obese America. He is obese America. Just like me.
Anyway, all this is yet another reminder that, in the Manosphere, as elsewhere, bigotries (and bigots) flock together.
P.S. After I wrote this post, I discovered that Davis M.J. Aurini, the self-described “author … strategist … neoreactionary monarchist, and … entrepreneur” who blogs at Stares at the World has offered up a dramatic reading of Price’s “translations” of Bundy’s remarks, along with an impassioned defense of Bundy, whom he declares to be a misunderstood hero and “the best friend that the blacks have right now.”
The convincingness of his argument is undercut slightly by the fact that Mr. Aurini’s “look” is basically “young Anton LaVey,” and that he also seems to be a graduate of the William Shatner School of Overemoting.
Also, it’s interesting to note that the commenters on YouTube who seem to like his video the most are actually pretty straightforward black-people-haters; one of them is the creator of a racist video “warning” about the supposed “health risks” to white women of interracial dating; another praises Birth of a Nation and agrees with the film’s stance that “the klan was justified in trying to stop all of those murderous blacks.”
Anyway, enjoy.
The thing about transhumanism, libertarian or otherwise, that scares me is that once the brain is semi- to fully-computerized, the temptation to start editing your personality to take away either undesirable or inefficient parts has got to be overwhelming. It seems like it’d be really tempting, especially in a capitalist/libertarian society, to edit out any parts of your brain that don’t contribute to your productivity, or, more likely, for your employer to demand that you do so as a condition of working for them.
I’m not totally opposed to the idea of personality editing, but I think that, in practice, the number of people I’d trust to actually have a good idea about what edits would be beneficial to me is so small it can be safely rounded to zero. I’m pretty sure that I shouldn’t even trust myself with that kind of power, even if limited to me editing my own brain.
RE: Leum
I go into that a bit! The brain computers non-uplifted people have don’t really have much impact on personality. Think of it as having your computer just controlled by your thoughts, rather than your hands and an electric plug.
The uplifted people or robotic folks DO derive a lot of their knowledge and “humanish” behaviors from their computers, and so not only is there the self-edit abuse problem, but there’s also the creeping horror that comes from knowing that the source of your sapience was created by your oppressors. A lot of people use that self-editing to hack their brains and try and make them their own, rather than their owners’.
Of course, there are people who go overboard, just like there are people who get hooked on plastic surgery. But… well, this IS an environment where property rights reign supreme. Nobody’s going to stop you from doing it. Technically, there are laws about breaking intellectual property laws on the tech IN your head… but where there is intellectual property, there are hackers, crackers, and pirates. Good luck catching them all.
Never underestimate the power of human inertia. There have been any number of societies that are shitty for the vast majority of the populace, and revolts are almost always scattered and unsuccessful. As long as your elites have access to big mercenary robot armies, and presumably they would, there wouldn’t be much the lower downs could do about it.
Buttercup: A lot of the debt peonage is local. Places in SE Asia where people are pressed into work, and then “owe” the company store for room and board, which is always more than they earn, esp. after they are docked for the “fee” required to get the job.
@LKH
There’s also the saying the religion is the opate of the masses so maybe turn The Market into a quasi religion.
As I recall the argument Marx made was Capitalists used religion as an opiate for the masses, so all that changes is the window dressing.
You know who else would expect you to rescue someone drowning in a river? Hitler.
LBT: Have you read the Uplift books? You talking about uplifted animals and slavery reminded me of the weird sort of indentured servitude dynamic of uplift in those books. It’s very different from what you’re describing, since uplift is a very long-term process that is done to a species as a whole, and so the indentured servitude applies to the species as a whole as well, but you still might find some useful concepts in there.
Shades of the 19th century collieries and mill towns here (UK). Workers were paid in vouchers that they could only use to buy (massively inflated) goods from the company store.
LBT, I just remembered the Many Colored Land / Saga of Pliocene Exile series by Julian May. The humanoid alien overlords used metapsychic technology to control their thralls and reward the willing.
Derangeddan – that’s a good point. One of the things that bothered me about the Uplift series was how utterly vile (from my perspective) the patron species were to their clients. One hundred millennia of truckling in return for something they never actually asked for? Almost as bad as the situation of the Gharm in Sheryl Tepper’s books.
RE: katz
As long as your elites have access to big mercenary robot armies, and presumably they would, there wouldn’t be much the lower downs could do about it.
Definitely possible. I’m also thinking of having a really strong social bias against outright violence, since weaponry has reached the point that nobody wants to vaporize the planet.
RE: Carrie Kube
There’s also the saying the religion is the opate of the masses so maybe turn The Market into a quasi religion.
Hmm. I could try, but I’m not entirely sure I could pull that off. Religion isn’t my strong suit, since I’m an atheist and all.
RE: derangeddan
Have you read the Uplift books? You talking about uplifted animals and slavery reminded me of the weird sort of indentured servitude dynamic of uplift in those books.
By Brin? No, but I’m going to have to now! I pulled the idea from the Grease Monkey comic, which probably pulled from there. (By the way, Grease Monkey is an awesome all-ages comic that’s actually intended for ALL AGES, a slice of life mechanic comic in space where gorillas were given human intelligence. It’s funny, thought-provoking, and so entertaining.)
RE: Robert
The humanoid alien overlords used metapsychic technology to control their thralls and reward the willing.
*smacks forehead* Oh, duh! Here I am talking about brain computers being a thing, and somehow I never considered that part of the technology could include “beneficial social behaviors” like docility and obedience. Welp, seeing as that tech is in FREAKIN EVERYONE, and the ones who don’t tend to be the ones who revolt and lack education, I suddenly have my form of social control!
@LBT
Your Grease Monkey link is wonky. Also, the site appears to be down.