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The Alt-Right has a new plan to take over the culture … by appropriating the “corporate symbols of the left” and — get this! — subverting them. And then, like, pasting them on buildings and stuff. Because no one has ever thought of THAT before!
In a recent blog post, the pickup-artist-turned-white-supremacist-Trump-superfan “Heartiste” proudly posts a photo of one such subversion: street posters that have transformed the Apple logo, “an iconic image of globohomo shitlibbery,” into “a pro-Trumpening war banner” by turning the standard bite from the apple into a Trump silhouette.
Aw, it’s cute — they think they’re Banksy!
Heartiste then posts his own contribution to the “existential war for the soul of Western Man.”
If you’ve ever wondered if it was possible to screw up in Photoshop if all you’re doing is posting words onto a plain white background, it turns out the answer is “yes.”
Here’s a slightly more clever use of the Adidas brand:
I found out today that Forbes has this rule call ‘The Trump Rule‘, and what it is is that whenever Trump states how wealthy he is, he’s actually worth only a third of what he says he does.
I love it.
@SFHC
I need to borrow your memory capacity for a while. Trying to study. :p
@ Scildfreja
This is one of the standard canards of the Right, yes.
Ah, but you see, they also donate to Pride and say they’re equal opportunity employers, so clearly they’re evil SJWs.
For totally different reasons, however. If the fat cats would just go back to publically shitting on minorities, the fascists would love them wholeheartedly again.
They don’t want to beat them. They want to join them.
Well, if they had foresight or a sense of history, they wouldn’t be fascists, would they?
The principle of charity can let you down sometimes. Fascists don’t want good outcomes for you, or for me. They want good outcomes for cishet christian (usually) white men, and they want everyone else dead or enslaved.
Right-libertarians like to pretend there’s a distinction between ‘real’ capitalism and ‘crony’ capitalism, but other fascists usually don’t bother.
@Weird (not wired) Eddie
Well. Pol, a bunch of people addressed you already, but I thought I would go into detail for any lurkers not quite sure what went wrong there.
I mean, you’re probably being truthful in that you believe this is a good solution. Society teaches us that people lash our because they’re lonely. That’s not really the whole story, though. Some people may lash out due to loneliness but that’s rarely the only factor.
-You assume that a relationship can fix someone. It can’t. Sometimes a relationship can have a positive influence on someone, but if they have hate as deep as heartiste there’s no amount of emotional support that a single person can provide that will fix it.
-You assume that he even wants a relationship. Asexual and aromantic people exist, and when you generalize problems like this as being fixable by sex or romance or both, you’re marginalizing people on those spectrums.
-Your suggestion would put a real human being in harm’s way. He is extremely hateful.
I’m not even going to get into the ‘it’ discussion because it’s already been covered well.
Btw, I’ve been told before that I just needed a relationship to “fix” me. I did not need one, could not emotionally handle one, and it caused me a lot of extra pain having to constantly answer questions about why I wasn’t ready for a relationship at that time. It’s extremely patronizing to assume that you know what’s best for someone when it comes to relationships.
Does anyone else find the ‘they’ (singular) pronoun feels a bit impersonal at times?
Sometimes it seems fine
“I was out with Bob last night; they’re a right laugh”
But at other times it seems a bit ‘distancing’
“Bob rang; they wanted to speak to you”
I know it’s the best we’ve got at the moment, but does anyone else experience this or is it just me? And if it is a real thing, any linguists have any ideas what’s behind it?
@Alan
Is the use of plural maybe a bit more distanced? For example, the royal we feels distant to me, similar to how the passive voice feels. And actually when I write documentation of my work I use ‘we’ even when I am the only one doing the work I’m documenting because ‘I’ feels too personal for formal documentation. But IANA Linguist. 🙂
@ Dalillama
Conservatives, particularly economic conservatives don’t have “legitimate movements” regarding economic issues… they don’t need to because they’ve almost always got the ear of the economic policymakers. That was not the case in 2008/2009. There was a large grass-roots conservative movement against the TARP bailout bill. CBS/NYTimes polled tea partiers (sorry, I don’t have the date, I .pdfed the article in May ’09) and found 79% opposed to TARP while only 56% of non-tea repubs opposed it. Repub legislatures who voted for TARP were 2.5 times more likely to be voted out in 2010 than were those who voted against it. NoWallStreetBailout.com, funded by the FreedomWorks conservative/Libertarian organization circulated a petition against the bill, here is a sample of petition signers’ comments:
(I’ll be interested to see if that blockquote works! Edit: IT WORKS!! IT WORKS!!) This flailing rage never gelled into a cohesive movement because: 1) it wasn’t a raging against the banking system, or even against the banking practices, so much as a “let them reap the spoils of their foolish practices”, which didn’t happen — TARP passed; 2) conservatives would find it hard to sustain a grass-roots movement which opposed moneyed capitalism for ANY reason, as money and capitalism are both seen as sacred; and 3) as you so eloquently state, there was a much bigger bogeyman, as Barack Obama had just been elected President. This tapped a huge reservoir of bigotry against a virtual buffet of people and practices, and the rest is history.
A group of angry, socially active conservatives was an inviting target for the fundamentalists, and turning the economic rage of the rank and file into rage against “divergent” social groups deflected that anger away from conservative politicians and especiallyaway from banks and other moneyed interests. Frankly, a common bonding of the economic conservatives and the Occupy movement was very unlikely in this political climate — it’s not Russia in 1917, and we’re far from the kind of social unrest that puts those groups together in the streets. Still, when we stand up for what we believe in, sometimes we might be surprised who we’re standing next to.
@Alan
It does feel a bit weird to me sometimes, and I know that when on autopilot my brain will prefer using “he” or “she” over “they” in certain sorts of sentences (even when I’m trying to avoid it). Though after spending more time with people whose pronouns are “they” it has become more natural feeling and automatic, simply through regular use.
@Bina
Can we not assume peoples’ gender/pronouns based on appearance? Like, I don’t necessarily disagree that Heartiste is a dude, but it’s not because of what he looks like.
Wait, what? Martin Shkreli seriously offered to buy 4chan? I thought that was some kind of hoax when I first saw it.
@Alan
Impersonal? No. Aberrant? Yes. More than likely, it’s just a matter of getting used to it…
Shkreli is worth maybe $50mill, plus hidden assets, minus attorney’s fees… anyone know what the Nishimura paid for it a couple years ago?
I’m with Viscaria here. To quote tumblr, straight white boys dress like someone pressed “randomise Sim”, and it’s time that the authorities did something about it.
(Even if I’m one of those straight white badly-dressed boys.)
@ kupo, dlouwe & axe
I’ve had a nice walk through the lanes muttering various sentence combinations to myself and I’ve arrived at a working hypothesis.
I’m very used to both using and hearing ‘they’ used mainly as a plural pronoun. So I’m conditioned to associating it with groups. It’s therefore got connotations of collective.
When used as a singular pronoun therefore there’s still that collective association. So it feels like you’re negating a person’s individuality. Thus it feels a bit dehumanising.
Doesn’t explain the exceptions but it’s just a hypothesis.
Re: clothing
Someone once said I dressed like I was trying to go undercover in Muggle society. I liked that.
Digging through the twitters and sites, seems like the current 4chan guy has turned down Shkreli’s offer to join the board. Impossible to be sure either way of course. Opinion of the channers is split 50-50, with the /pol/ doods cheering on Shkreli, and everyone else bein all “o no end of world” and “don’t sell to Shkreli”. Which is about what I suspected. So, the chans are hurting for money, and we may see a split, with the racist shitheads being forcefully ejected into a new space and the rest being able to talk about video games and anime and stuff without them. Which is good! I betcha there could be a mass evacuation to, like, Stormfront if that happens, plus it’s likely that they’ll put together an imageboard of their own. Here’s betting that it’ll be, like, 1488chan or something awful.
@Alan, yeah, I find that at times. It’s likely just unfamiliarity giving a sense of archaic, formal structure, as has already been said.
@kupo, sounds like every family gathering I’ve ever been to! I still struggle with feeling like I’m flawed or broken for not being in a relationship, and I dread visiting relatives for just that reason.
Mm. I’m not sure if you’re following me on the principle of charity thing. The principle of charity isn’t about being charitable, it’s about interpreting the opposing idea in as strong a form as possible. It’s an assumption of reasonableness. (Of course, it’s highly likely that they don’t actually hold the idea for good reasons, but that’s irrelevant to the argument). Forming their reason as “because I want to crush people who aren’t like me” isn’t giving the argument the strongest form.
It’s a lot of intellectual faff and nonsense, of course – at the end of the day it doesn’t matter what their motivations are, they’re still horrible fascist assholes (Though I’m sorta putting this lens on a broad range of conservatives here, not just the fascists). This whole exercise isn’t to excuse them, it’s to figure out where their perspective differs from ours, in what direction, by how much.
They’re such a weird, violent, shitty puzzle, aren’t they?
@Alan : in french, using the plural pronoun instead of the singular one is overall a way to distanciate and show respect over people with a better social status. So I am with you in that “they” feel distancing, even if for me it’s by association.
(side note : in french, there is a plural masculine form and a plural feminine form, who is used *only* if all the element in the set are female. I have seen some discussions of people who want to change that rule to “use the gender most common in the set”, which cause trouble when you don’t actually know the gender of everyone ; and some other who tried to create an hybrid term, which have the problem of feeling unnatural, and usually – there is some variation – being unpronunceable or an homonym of something else entirely. I don’t know any solution that I truly like for that problem in french, so you english speakers are officially authorized to feel relieved to have such an easy solution)
In a vacuum, I kind of prefer to change the structure of a sentence to use “neutral” pronoun if it can remove pronouns, but that bring its own set of problem, mostly not alway being very natural. But I guess “they” is good enough.
Since I am not a linguist, I can’t say if plural for distanciation is a common trend across language.
More close to the topic : I feel that the economic grievance of the republican conservative base (*not* the alt right, but the empoverished working white class) are legitimate. But they campaign for things that rather obviously won’t improve things for them !
And, of course, them having real economic grievance don’t give them carte blanche to be racist assholes. The white working class is throwing a tantrum, and I feel annoyed at the thought that this tantrum may very well work. For them and only them, that is.
There’s another option to gender-neutral pronouns: use nouns and names instead. Yes, it feels a little stilted and weird at first, but you get used to it pretty quickly. People who don’t want to refer to God as a gendered being just replace all instances of “He” with “God” and somehow get along fine, so I don’t know any reason why anyone else can’t do that as a general rule.
@Ohlmann, exactly! They’re legitimate, and the thing is, they aren’t stupid! It’s easy to say “Oh, they’re just being misled”, but who’s to say that they’re being more misled than I am? If they are especially vulnerable to being misled, why? What’s that vulnerability? There are so many good questions to ask about why they seem to act against their own best interests. It’s really fertile ground.
Anne Lewis, Jib Creatr
“Adidas: All Day I Dream About Skyrim”
Yay! I love Skyrim! 😊
“ETA: Yes there are mods that add sneakers to the game.”
That doesn’t surprise me at all. There is a mod of everything.
@Scildfreja Unnýðnes
They’ll never go back to Something Awful, the moderation is too strict and the mods don’t take well to casual bigotry.
Now on the subject of whether or not for 4chan to change hands, eh cut the rotting mold from the batch. Let the con man who profits off people’s medical ailments pair up with the fascists, I see no problem with that.
I’m in Kansas where the impoverished white working class grieves for the state of the state budget and for the finances of the schools and repeatedly reelects the people who torpedoed both… what can I say?
On the subject of fe/male pronouns, as I may have mentioned before, I went to an Oxford college which was women-only, but went mixed after I left (all the Gaudy Night fans in the house say “chessmen!”).
Up until my year, a graduate was an alumna (collectively, alumnae). I thought the college missed a major trick in not sticking to that nomenclature. But no. Apparently I’m now a member (alumnus) of the alumni, because one alumnus was added to the group. It’s even more annoying that the wider society ALMOST gets it right by accident. People who haven’t studied Latin tend to pronounce alumni “alum – n – eye”, which is actually how alumnae is correctly pronounced. Alumni should be “alum-n-ee”. Oh well…
We also had a lovely banner saying “Liberty, Equality, Sorority”. I wonder where it’s gone.
Chessmen!
@Scildfreja
That’s the thing, it is. Literally their entire position is ‘If those uppity [slurs] would learn their place, everything would be peachy again.’ You’re looking for a stronger argument that simply isn’t there.
From my perspective?
“They” is perfectly fine; I believe the Great Bard Shakespeare used it as well. And “he” and “she” are a tad bizarre at times, why do you have to know a sapient’s gender (and how come there are only two options anyway) in order to talk about them? What’s in that gender which is so important like in 95% of the time?
(“They” and “she” are valid options for me, FYI; agender, but since I do jack and shit to my presentation besides dressing like someone who got stuck to black t-shirt era forrrreeeeeverrrr, I can take ‘she’ since it is not obvious on a glance. Now, handing me a baby “because women deal with babies, hold this for me for a while”, THAT will cause a protest…)
@ Diptych
Yay! Breaks my heart whenever I think about them.
What I love most, though (apart from the fact that Sayers clearly used Somerville as the template for her fictional Shrewsbury, as I can see in my mind’s eye every corner she describes), is that it’s a mid-thirties description of how Nazi Germany is being perceived, which robs it of any 20:20 hindsight allegations (for good or ill; the casual anti-semitism is wince-inducing, but all the more authentic for it).
Chessmen!
(“I loved them, and you gave them to me.”)
@ ohlmann
Ah yes, the whole ‘tu/vu’ thing. I understand there’s a similar thing in German.
@ POM
Yeah, I can see that. Although then theres that almost verbal tick thing. Ah well, if we can transition from thee thou thy I’m sure we’ll eventually suss this one.
Agreed 100%. I get a lot of pushback from my mother on that whenever a new baby is born, even when I’m sick and don’t want to get the germs on the baby, but thankfully the mothers don’t force me and she can’t really do much beyond roll her eyes and/or pout. I don’t like babies.
@Weatherwax
It’s such a perfect picture of the pre-war intellectual set. Varying positions on feminism – from the Dean’s magnanimity to Miss Hillyard’s crusading anti-femininity; varying stripes of classism, even (perhaps especially) by the protagonists; general agreement as to the benefits of eugenics; little deliberate racism, but certainly a massive tonal discord for modern readers; and, generally, wonderfully written and full of insight.
Re: pronouns: certainly, the singular “they” is linguistically sound and well-supported, and I feel fairly confident using it in everyday conversation… but I feel have that slight sense of impersonality, which leads me to be happy to use “he” or “she” for myself but hesitate over “they”. Funny, innit?
Re: The pronoun discussion
I think it would be a good thing if more languages were like Finnish (or Estonian) in that the third person singular is non-gendered. We just have the one “hän” that serves all genders equally. There’s also “se” which is nominally used only for non-human creatures or non-living things, although it’s used for people as well in colloquial speech.
This has been your linguistics lesson for today. 😀
‘They’ is a little weird but not too hard to say. I already say ‘him’ and ’em’ similarly, so that’s not an issue. Reflexive case is the thing that gets me tho. Everything in my being rejects ‘themselves’ as singular, leaving ‘themself’. That’s not even a word. Rock and a hard place, ya know? Luckily, reflexive case is avoidable in most situations, so I scarcely hafta use it
Re: mad white people (not getting at anyone here. Venting generally)
They can have a seat. I’m so sick and tired of the white middle/working class and people tryna understand them. Fuck em. You’re not special. Any grievance you have, somebody else, white or otherwise, will be able to discuss it just as well as you. Preferably somebody who isn’t supporting a fascist for President. And what even are these grievances? What’re the unique challenges faced by the white middle class? Not rhetorical
And that gets to the bigger point. The white middle class is taken seriously while everyone else’s issues are diminished. Black people hafta start a fuckin movement in order to get people talking about how cop killings are maybe a bad thing. Meanwhile, Chet from Iowa and Linda from Nevada are separately, nebulously incensed at ‘the establishment’, and everybody’s lining up to solve their problems
And of course, they’ll go on and on about making the country ‘great again’ and how everything’s worse than it was. Yadda yadda, dogwhistle dogwhistle. They don’t feel like they have a voice, so they’ll elect as their voice a person who’ll take away everyone else’s voice. Like I said. Fuck em. They’re human beings, Murican citizens no less, and a lot are seriously suffering. But as far as I’m concerned, as soon as you throw everyone else under the bus like that, you can take a number and go all they way to the back of the fuckin line. We’ll get to your grievances. Eventually…
RE: Pronouns
They is singular.
People use the singular they all the time in conversation and don’t notice it.
What does ‘shiv-right’ mean? I’d Google it but I’m scared.
Also, I started to take Heartiste’s hot girl test, but then I was supposed to do shit like measure for a hip to waist ratio, and I decided I didn’t care that much about accurate results. I’m doing laundry and writing a history test instead.
@ Axe
I think perhaps Trump is exploiting the fundamental selfishness of panicking human beings; and feeding/creating that panic.
To adopt a crude analogy: imaging a rescue team is adopting a triage system and evacuating the people with the most severe cases of hypothermia first. They say “don’t worry we’ll get to everyone eventually”.
Trump is the guy yelling that the ship is sinking and there aren’t enough lifeboats to go around. He’s then saying ‘follow me and I’ll push our way to the front of the queue’ (and fuck those other people who don’t really have hypothermia, shouldn’t have been allowed on the ship in the first place, don’t appreciate you’re a bit chilly yourself etc.)
An unscrupulous tactic; but history shows it can be effective if you can convince enough people that they won’t get a place in a lifeboat before its too late.
The calm sensible person saying there’s room enough for everyone can get drowned out in such circumstances.
Funny story about the singular they:
In my brief stint as Writing Center Coordinator* I once got a blistering reply from one of the English faculty for daring to use “they” as a singular pronoun to ensure tutor/student confidentiality.
Two weeks later, that particular English faculty member posted a link to a Washington Post article about how they were officially transitioning to a singular they as a gender neutral pronoun and all the English faculty seemed pretty excited about it.
I felt secretly vindicated.
English is bizarre and confusing, and the singular they is awesome.
*I was a Math Specialist but we lost our Writing Specialists and the new one wasn’t hired yet so they were like “CONTRAPANGLOSS! You wrote papers as an undergrad! Manage the Writing Studio for us!”
You can guess how well that worked. I was extremely happy when a real writing specialist was hired.
Handsome Jack is entirely correct, as usual.
I took Monzach’s remarks to mean, not that English has no non-gendered third person singular, but that English might be better off if it only had non-gendered third-person singulars. Which, I suspect, is true.
@Axe
This, this right here.
The only one I can think of is being racist scum. Not joking. If the white middle and working class could get over that one, they’d be sitting pretty.
That’s the thing, BLM is addressing their damn grievances. Their platform explicitly addresses economic justice, and all the things they propose would help the white working class too.
Seriously. “An aggrieved sense of entitlement” technically counts as a unique challenge, but, well, there’s one solution and it’s not one any outside person can provide.
I’m not Ohlmann, but you’re describing the radical conception of power. For myself, I concede that it could be a useful framework and it probably does happen, but for any given supposed example I tend to be very skeptical of it. I am inclined to always think that any individual is the #1 expert on what is in that person’s best interest, and that that person will operate to achieve that to the best of their ability. If we think that someone is operating against their own best interest, the question we really need to ask ourselves is why we think that we know that person’s best interest better than the person does.
This is not to diminish the power, per se, of power, but I think the Foucaultean framework of structural power is a less problematic one than the radical conception of power. Foucault’s conception of power allows for people to operate in their own best interests to the best of their abilities, while still acknowledging that the ultimate results can wind up turned around backward.
You is also plural.
Interesting chat about trump supporters. I do find it odd that many of trump’s supporters are people who feel like they’ve ‘lost out’ in the current economy, and that many of those actually have. Lost their jobs, houses, whatever.
The odd thing is, these are the very people that trump intends to leave high and dry if trump wins.
@PoM: I’m not even a novice to frameworks of structural power. Do you have a good link to the cliffnotes version of foucaultean vs radical structures? If not, that’s cool. I’ll spend some time wading through Google.
Re. pronouns: I honestly try not to use pronouns when speaking of individual people, at least, since I found out this was an issue. It felt a bit clunky at first, but I’m starting to get comfortable with it. In fact, it helps me keep track of who, exactly, I’m referring to at any given moment.
@Eddie: I actually just moved to Kansas, and I was chatting with a psych therapist at one of the nursing homes I cover this morning, and the therapist told me that I should vote to keep the current state supreme court, because this particular court shanghaied the current Governor’s attempts to gut public education. Any truth to that? It sounds like one of many state issues I don’t have time to read up on before the election. Because I have to study for my Geriatrics boards on November 2nd. Grrr…
@PoM
*applauds*
@Dali
I got higher incidence of drug addiction and maybe something something farm stuff. Completely blank beyond that
Key word. White people (but dudes mostly) aren’t “too”. Everyone else is supposed to be “too”. It’s not about solutions, it’s about their solutions. So long as they or someone like them thought of it for them, it’s OK. Ugh…
@Alan
Yep. And your ‘punishment’ for going along with that panic is the back of the fuckin line
I see what you did thar 😀
@Diptych
I shall use this phrase henceforth. Thankee kindly 🙂
I think you’ll find that the plural of “you” is “youze”.
Delighted to oblige!
Also, I suspect that the reason that the singular they seems distancing is at least in part that English speakers have long used it to indicate ‘person I don’t have enough information about to determine a gender for’. So saying ‘Someone called from the bank? Did they leave a message?’ sounds natural, and so does ‘If someone slips and falls on that ice they’ll probably sue’. But ‘we worked with Amelia on the last project and they were awesome. They walked us through every step.’ sounds odd, because if you had such a great frickin’ experience with Amelia, how come you don’t know if Amelia is a guy or a gal?
That will change, I imagine. I’m old enough to remember when calling one man another’s husband sounded weird in liberal circles, and now it doesn’t. Language changes pretty fast.
@Axe
I think you got something with the drugs, but shit farm policy is definitely not just a white people problem.
Like I said; if white people could just get over being such racist shitheads, we’d all be doing a damn sight better.
@Alan
Trump and his friends are the ones who blew a hole in the damn hull in the first place, and I have neither patience nor sympathy for anyone who wants to follow his advice now.
@Alan
It’s ‘vous’, not ‘vu’. /nitpick
Having a familiar/formal (and singular/plural) split in second person words is pretty common in a bunch of languages. Du and sie, in German, tú and vos in Spanish, etc. English actually has a familiar(/singular) second person word too. It’s ‘thou’. It’s just been phased out of our language and sounds incredibly archaic now.
@Podkayne
That’s some food for thought…
@Dali
Agreed on both points 🙂
Re: pronouns
Oh you lucky lucky bastards, who only have to deal with third person prounouns and occasionally an old relic of a gendered word.
Even in a language like French, which is more gendered than English, you still have second person as neutral, and the verb forms tend to be the same for male and female.
Semitic languages, though? Nope nope nopity nope. (Specifically speaking here of Hebrew and Arabic, being the ones I know, although I think the general rules apply to others as well.)
Wanna say “you”? You have to choose if it’s את (“att”, feminine) or אתה (“atta”, masculine). Wanna choose the plural instead? Sure, pick אתם (“attem”, m.pl.) or אתן (“atten”, f.pl.) and so on.
And verbs are gendered, as well; even our “neutral” (the equivalent to “one does”, or the more modern “you do”) is usually based on the masculine plural present participle. You can’t win.
The only places where you can bypass that are first person singular/plural (but only in past or future tenses, because our present tense is the participle so you have to choose again between אני כותב [“ani kotev”, I write / am writing, m.] or אני כותבת [“ani kotevet”, same, f.]) and, in a way, the third person plural forms (past/future/imperative tenses only, again because of the participle), which is technically the masculine form but has been used for both male and female since a very early time – so much so that in past tense, third person plural doesn’t even have a feminine form (other tenses have a feminine form which tends to sound more archaic). The latter is only true for Hebrew; as far as I know, Arabic does still make that distinction, although that might be different in different dialects.
And even then, it’s kind of a crappy solution, because you’re still using the male as default, and erasing the feminine. It isn’t a truly neutral form.
Some activists have taken to using the feminine form as default, in protest, and to try and change what looks “natural”. I still can’t get myself to do that, even though I appreciate what they’re doing.
@Axe : the extra super duper annoying part with the grievance of the white is that they sure make a good job at looking like a ticking fascist bomb if we don’t take care of their problem. I hope to be wrong on that -_-