Intolerant Chic: The new “white people” are bigoted, but not the way you think—or they’ll admit...

[guitarist]

$tevie wrote:
It's not just Bing Crosby vs. Frank Sinatra. What about Bill Monroe, John Coltrane, Victor Herbert operettas, Jimmie Rodgers, Paul Robeson, or Richard Strauss? The same people did not listen to all these types of music!

Those were the hipster noncomformists, the flip side of a mass white-bread population. One doesn't exclude the other, you're right, they coexisted. David Halberstam's book "The 50s" does a great job of demonstrating how radical the 50s were, many of the great social and cultural movements really started right after WW2 (the sexual revolution, civil rights, etc.) not in the 60s, he makes a case similar to yours, that the social uniformity was never there to begin with.

What about the "Cafe Society" scene in NYC in the thirties? Those people surely felt they were quite different than "the masses" in both taste and intellect.

They, too, were the nonconformists, digging jazz, radical chic, and hot bohemian sex. The intellectual left embraced--then rejected---socialist fantasy, after witnessing its inevitable path to oppression, imprisonment, and mass murder. Phony marxist phrases like "the masses" wouldn't become popular again until the 60s. But the tastes and intellect of cafe society informed and influenced mass culture, in art, music, literature.

The only big difference I see from past 20th century "elitists" and current 21st century "elitists" is that today they are not all that interested in talking about the downtrodden and the Working Man, and that is probably mostly because "socialism" and "communism" are no longer considered Hip. Or Hep as the case may be.

Socialist and communist ideology is alive well, the virus has mutated, and is flourishing around the margins of the intellectual elite, and in academia, it just has different names now, "postmodernism", "post-colonialism", etc.

The left's inability to firmly reject and successfully kill the virus is one of the things that alienates the orthodox intellectual left from the modern realist left, and burdens its ambitions for recapturing the mainstream.

I think the article--and the website---playfully mocks the insulated bubble brand-identity world consumerists inhabit. I was in Whole Foods the other day, and felt alarmingly at home. Hip, cozy conformism posing as non-conformism.

We've nicknamed our most luxurious local Mall, U-Village, as "white village", because of the elite demographic it serves. This is before the "what white people like" website and book deal, the stereotype already existed (though "white' doesn't accurately characterize it, either) It's sort of about post-mass society, insulated micro-niche society.

[$tevie]

I think the entire idea of "hip, cozy conformism posing as non-conformism" has as much validity as an old Bewitched episode with the characters pretending to be dirty hippies.

People make this stuff up based on nothing at all but their own impressions of things. Between you and me we just proved that the author is full of sh!te about popular culture, and that was just about all he had in his arsenal.

[guitarist]

$tevie wrote:
I think the entire idea of "hip, cozy conformism posing as non-conformism" has as much validity as an old Bewitched episode with the characters pretending to be dirty hippies.

Excellent example. Using a retro-TV sitcom reference to illustrate your disagreement does more to validate the author's point than it does to undermine it. Bravo! I couldn't have said it better myself.

The website makes no claim to be anything other than trivial and entertaining, its founder made a book out of it, but wisely avoids reading anything significant into it, or building a social thesis on it.

What is revealed is less comfortable to confront: those who proudly carry the banner of "diversity" are, in reality, some of the most narrowly-conformist people you'll ever meet in your life.


()

[$tevie]

guitarist wrote: What is revealed is less comfortable to confront: those who proudly carry the banner of "diversity" are, in reality, some of the most narrowly-conformist people you'll ever meet in your life.

People love to say that, but they are talking about people they have never met, and will never meet because they are phantoms.

I live and work in an extremely "elitist" community of artists and musicians and bohemians and gays, and we do not sit around discussing diversity or coffee. We talk about the same things anyone else talks about, including old TV shows. The difference is, we realize that not everyone who is different is being different just to impress a bunch of strangers somewhere in the midwest that we don't even care about. In fact, we aren't even different. We just "are".

Why are you so worried about people that you don't know? It's a waste of your time and brain cells. Fsck'em if they don't like what you like -- don't sit around worrying about it.

[$tevie]

I'm back. Don't you find something incredibly intolerant about disliking people you don't know because they shop someplace you consider Trendy?

[guitarist]

$tevie wrote:
People love to say that, but they are talking about people they have never met, and will never meet because they are phantoms.

I live and work in an extremely "elitist" community of artists and musicians and bohemians and gays, and we do not sit around discussing diversity or coffee. We talk about the same things anyone else talks about, including old TV shows. The difference is, we realize that not everyone who is different is being different just to impress a bunch of strangers somewhere in the midwest that we don't even care about. In fact, we aren't even different. We just "are".

People love to say that, but like most, they tend to cluster in like-minded groups who share the same tastes, values, and political affiliations. I'm not sure where you got the idea about someone trying to impress someone in another region, or that flesh-and-blood people are mere "phantoms" because they're not in the same room with you.

$tevie wrote: Why are you so worried about people that you don't know? It's a waste of your time and brain cells. Fsck'em if they don't like what you like -- don't sit around worrying about it.

This is insightful, coming from someone who, like the rest of us, enjoys wasting time typing thoughts and opinions in a silly website like this, but can then tell others what they should or shouldn't be "worried" about, or how they should or shouldn't spend their recreational time, whether it's sitting down, sitting around, or standing up. Yeah, man, we get that you didn't like the website or the article, you're welcome to like or dislike it as you wish, but when you pretend it's all beneath your dignity, it's hardly convincing.

:monkey:

[$tevie]

It's beneath YOUR dignity was what I was saying. Stop worrying about who is shopping in Whole Foods next to you and get on with your life.