nydwracu niþgrim, nihtbealwa mæst

Everyone’s favorite smug sack of fecal matter is at it again. As if cheap Googlebombing campaigns weren’t enough, Dan Savage decided to put on his New Atheist hat and do what they—and 13-year-olds on Livejournal—do best: rattle on about the Bible in the same tone of self-righteous willful ignorance as they imagine conservatives adopting on evolution. “If we came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys, huh?” If Leviticus talks about shellfish, why do Christians still eat shellfish, huh?

Now, I’m not concerned here with his embarrassingly simplistic New Atheist view of theology, wherein all religion that was, is, and ever will be is fundamentally isomorphic to overliteral bookstore-Protestantism; having been raised into a thoroughly secularized version of said Protestantism (albeit one with some strange bits mixed in—I’ve put pepper on food maybe twice in my life), I’m most likely the least qualified person to talk theology out of those who are aware that there’s more to it than reading what’s in the monosyllables-only translation picked up for $5 at Walmart. (Now, now, Julius, put down that Talmud. You aren’t a rabbi; stop playing at it. You’ll poke someone’s eye out.) I’m also not going to bother with the lines he recycled from that hack Sam Harris; a ten-year-old could do that, unless the demon-virus Whiggery has already implanted itself in their knowledge of history. Even his shifty-eyed insistence that Universalism is somehow on the decline, when one would have to be delusional to think gay marriage will not be widely accepted in thirty years, will be left aside for now. My question here is a simple one:

“Pansy-ass”? Really? What are these high school students doing applauding a kindergarten line?

The answer, of course, should be obvious to anyone who has read Moldbug. One quick find-and-replace, and…

[Savage] really goes beyond smugness. Searing arrogance is more like it. I am reminded of the tone of the famous Soviet humor magazine, Krokodil, which loved to parody the buffoonish, corrupt doings of the hooligan dissidents. Alas, Krokodil is no more. But perhaps we can remember the entire trope in which the smug and powerful mock the hooligans, peasants and barbarians as crocodile humor.

Crocodile humor, from a crocodile. Notice his tone throughout the speech: raining curses with one finger raised, reveling in the worthlessness of his constructed enemy, he smirks and shakes his head at the filthy, fuck-dumb proles. I’ve seen it before: it’s the tone, the exact same tone, my professor takes when he goes colonial, starts rattling on about the backwardsness of the idiots in town, how silly they are for caring about little things like the college bringing in a crane to pluck the cross from its chapel, built on the highest point in town, or for almost electing a newcomer over an “all-around great guy” who just happens to be a colonizer Democrat. Dan Savage wishing that the Republicans would go away sounds exactly like the professor wishing… well, that the Republicans would go away. Odd coincidence, that.

“These savages don’t have a leg to stand on!”, the crocodile cries. “Why won’t they get out of our way? After all, we know better. We are better. With actual power, just think what we could do!”

The mere existence of active opposition, no matter how powerless, is enough to set the crocodile off. The enemy must be crushed: converted if possible, raped and slaughtered if not. (This, I suspect, is why crocodiles are so drawn to the left: a movement that advocates the mass rewriting of society will naturally draw those who want to rewrite society in their image.) Fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem of war; but if they repent, and establish regular prayers and practice regular charity, then open the way for them: for the International Community is Oft-Forgiving, Most Merciful.

Of course, it should come as no surprise that the rhetoric of war fits so naturally here; the main difference between caste-war and the normal kind is that the latter has an end. And once the Kernels are situated, that is when the game is afoot. The true war begins, light versus dark, good versus evil. This is a war that the forces of light are always destined to lose…

A while back, there was a stabbing on campus: three guys from town (two black, one Puerto Rican) got into one of the affinity houses during a party, stole an iPod, and when someone tried to stop them, he got knifed. This came up in a class, when the professor notified us all of it; the bureaucrats had tried to cover it up, but the professors generally hate their guts, so of course that wouldn’t work.

Anyway, the class got to talking about that, and this led to the topic of bad relations between the town and the college in general. A liberal arts college in AV country is in trouble no matter what, but it turns out that the college has a decades-long record of using their financial clout to control local politics; they also attempt to get the students involved in political advocacy (there was a plug for supporting the DREAM Act running in the daily campus newsletter for a few weeks last month, for example), and I suspect that there wouldn’t be Democrats in local government if there weren’t college professors around—in one of his tirades about the ‘backwards’ townies, the professor mentioned that one Democrat, who he clearly supported, won by only 18 votes.

I could go on about those tirades, about how one of the (white) students physically recoiled in horror on finding out that the town is over 90% white, and about the general colonial-office attitude of utter contempt for the ‘savage’ townies held by professors and students alike, but this story has a punchline revealing enough to make all of that unnecessary.

The last thing this professor said in that discussion was, “I don’t understand why they [local Dalits] hate us [the college], when we’ve done so much for them.”

Now remember: they were there to steal an iPod.

(Update: If you don’t care about Moldbug’s caste system but still want an analysis of juggalos, you’ll probably want to go here.)

I suppose it was inevitable that the alt-right blogosphere would discover juggalos eventually. Unfortunately, they come no closer to a proper analysis than anyone else.

Not all decay comes from the lower class; some comes from the middle, but due to the nature of the decay they bring about, they are never portrayed as such. It should go without saying that there is no cohesive society in much of America, but a patch to that bug has been found: to fill that alienating void, subcultures (more properly, sub-societies, although that is unfortunately not the established term) have been formed, which offer at least some of the benefits—institutions, shared culture, sense of identity, self-esteem—of a proper society. Mangan comes close to admitting this point:

One of the most repellant aspects of the Juggalos is the way they have themselves convinced that they comprise some sort of brotherhood, that they receive a form of acceptance from each other that “normal” society has somehow denied them

However, this is not a proper solution, for two reasons: that it increases cultural diversity, and that it is not available to everyone. Every ingroup is an outgroup to everyone else, and outgroups are commonly demonized on any available pretense. Subculture membership carries a significant social stigma, which rules it out to all but those who have nothing to lose and those who have no worries about losing anything; for everyone else, joining a subculture would be simply trading one form of alienation for another form whose consequences are, if not worse, at least far more visible. To put this problem in terms of Mencius Moldbug’s caste analysis, subcultures are a viable option to Dalits and some Brahmins, but not to Vaisyas or Optimates. (Helots, of course, have no need for a subculture.)

But, you ask, why “any available pretense”? Surely there must be a clear reason to demonize the juggalos? As Mangan says:

The video on the Juggalos shows us a motley, highly unappealing collection of the most idiotic, most pierced morons that one could imagine. None of them seem to be able to use any other adjective but f**kin’ or m*****f**kin’, nor to say anything that makes much sense. All of them appear to be on massive quantities of drugs and/or alcohol.

I will not dispute those points, but can someone point me to any negative aspect of the juggalo subculture that does not appear to a far greater degree in Brahmin subcultures? (And no, the fact that juggalos are encouraged to be alpha and Brahmins are encouraged to be beta does not count.) Brahmins are notorious for such behavior, and yet they hardly ever draw criticism for it, even in blatantly Vaisya circles. (Also, those traits, in and of themselves, are not negative; it is only when they are taken to extremes that they become negative. But an inability to grasp the concept of moderation is pervasive in America, so that does not complicate the analysis.)

In fact, these traits appear across the caste system, but some groups draw more criticism than others. Examination of those patterns of criticism reveal some interesting patterns: it is well-known that BDH institutions criticize negative traits of OV groups and vice versa, but BDH institutions also frequently criticize some Dalits; specifically, the white ones, commonly known as ‘rednecks’.

Mencius Moldbug’s caste system cannot explain this without an addition: the Antyaja caste, covered by Jim Goad in his Redneck Manifesto. Their exclusion from the original model is understandable, since, whether due to their status as a monkey wrench into prevailing Brahmin theology or out of honest ignorance, Brahmins almost never acknowledge their existence, and commonly confuse them with Vaisyas. (I have experienced this firsthand; my mother is a Brahmin from a vaguely Optimate background, but the rest of my family and many of my friends are Vaisyas, so I was raised somewhat between castes. I made the mistake of believing I was a Brahmin, going to a very strongly Brahmin college, and maintaining some Vaisya ideals, so I was treated as an Antyaja, by which I mean I was accused of being a member of the KKK, told that America and the world would be better off without people like me, and forced out after one semester.)

Another possible reason for their exclusion is that they severely complicate the model. They cannot be said to be allied with either side of the BDH-OV conflict; although they clearly fall on the OV side, OV have about as negative an opinion of them as they do of BDH. In addition, they pattern with BDH on some issues: they tend to be Democrats despite their generally Republican political views, and they, unlike Optimates and Vaisyas, can form subcultures, as exemplified by the thoroughly Antyaja phenomenon of juggalos.

Which brings us back to the original point. Although subculture formation results in higher cultural diversity and therefore higher levels of alienation, lack of effective subculture formation usually means even higher levels of alienation; the underclass (Dalits, Helots, and Antjayas) are better off in this regard than many Brahmins and even Vaisyas, as Van Jones pointed out, although those without a solution to the problem are far harder to criticize, due to their lack of identification with any specific group. But the worst possible scenario, I think, is ineffective subculture formation, which provides none of the benefits of subculture formation but all of the drawbacks. In other words, hipsters.

And as for the charge that Insane Clown Posse “sounds no different than the usual black rap”… well, I’d like to see Soulja Boy do this. Or even this.