Not All Cultures Are Equal and That’s the Point

I did a quick video intro to this crazy post.

I’ve always found myself resistant to the term “critic.” That goes for just about anything—restaurant critic, film critic, art critic, music critic, social critic, cultural critic. You name it. For everything that some people take up as values, there has to be a critic who takes it upon themselves to authoritatively declare what’s good and what’s bad according to some self-serving set of guidelines. What I think it is, is people with an errant need to elevate themselves by easily tearing down, through sneering criticism, the values that others create through hard-ass dedicated work.

It’s fucking pathetic, weak, and small-dick-complex in every imaginable way.

In light of that, I much prefer the term “reviewer.” A reviewer aims to make you aware of as many facets of something as they can. Whether they’re talking about food, wine, art, culture, or music, they help you categorize where it fits within that niche or microculture. I find myself drawn to what might be called a cultural critic, but I prefer to think of it as a reviewer, dot connector, synthesizer, and integrator. And it strikes me that I’m pretty well-suited for it.

Here’s a bit of background: Until I was about 21 years old, I’d left the United States only once—a trip to Victoria Island in Canada. But in 1982, I got a real shake-up. I joined the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (NROTC) unit at Oregon State. Traditionally, between your junior and senior years, the Navy sends you out to the fleet somewhere in the world. For me, that was to board the USS San Bernardino County (an LST) on an R&R port visit in Busan, Korea. We were there for a few days (I paid my first “bar fine” at 21-years-old and the cute and sexy gal took me to her place), then spent about a month at sea, and then a few days in Sasebo, Japan (where I would meet the daughter of bar owners who would rock my world a few years hence, once I visited again). From there, I was shuttled to Yakota Air Force base outside Tokyo. A bunch of us took the train that night and experienced downtown Tokyo all night long, barely making it back to the base in time for our chartered 747 flight back to the U.S. I was pleasantly culture shocked, and it never left my bones.

What it utterly destroyed in me in the blissful ignorance most Americans live under…that they’re unequivocally the best at everything, and only they can know the correct or best way at just about anything, and especially when it comes to moral questions. American ignorance-based hubris puts me off. Since I was 21 years old…so I’m at 42 years of calling bullshit on that, looking right square into your American eyes.

The Australian rock band AC/DC tells you about her American Eyes and American Thighs. The walls stated shakin’, the earth was quakin’. All night long.

To my mind, it asks, which Australians got American rock & roll sub-culture better than AC/DC? I’d venture to bet there are millions of Americans who have no clue that Malcolm and Angus Young are Aussies, and so were all the bandmates who came and went. Other than them, who do you have? Midnight Oil, Men at Work, Crocodile Dundee, and the late Steve Irwin (my personal fav)?

It’s a damn good show, mates.

… Fast forward a couple of years from that Korea visit, and I requested duty assignment to Japan. I spent five years living within 10 km of the Navy Base in Yokosuka, Japan, through two tours of duty with the USS Reeves and then with the Seventh Fleet staff. But I lived outside the base, among Japanese people. I had Japanese girlfriends. I regularly went up to Tokyo. I eventually acquired a motorcycle and a car, so I was all over the place all the time. And because it was the navy, we went out to sea often, from weeks to months at a time (I never locked the door to my house, keys were in the ignition of my unlocked car and MC…how’s that for honor amongst the honorable, culturally speaking?).

You’re talkin’ visits to Korea, Okinawa, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and even Australia. That last wasn’t much of a culture shock. I’d be asked, ‘ever listen to Australian rock music?’ and I’d ask back, “surely you’ve heard of AC/DC?” That’s funny, right?

… Well, there was also that Vegemite sandwich thing from a land down under, where women glow and men plunder. It would be the Swagman Hotel in Angeles City, Philippines (outside Clark Air Force Base at the time) where I’d acquire the taste for Vegemite on toast for an Aussie style breakfast in ’87 or thereabouts…

After completing that stage in Japan and Asian cultures all over the southeast—and after some additional rounds and rounds—I ended up in my last tour of the Navy as an exchange officer to the French Navy. I had to learn the language and worked every day within French language and culture. European culture isn’t radically different from American culture; one could say it’s kind of between what I experienced in Asia for five years and what is American.

After that, I left the Navy and came back to the United States. I started a business and got married. But did I marry a Western European-descent American? No. I married someone of Mexican descent. Our marriage amicably ended 18 years later. What did I do? Sold everything, grabbed a 60L backpack, and left for Thailand. Now I’m coming up on five years of living here. Incidentally, because I make my home in areas with a high concentration of tourists and expats, I get not only Thai culture but also the various cultures that visit or live here, and the interplay between them.

One could say I have a pretty good résumé in terms of my assessment of cultures. I try not to be a critic as much as an observer and a reviewer. Sometimes a cheerleader too. Or, an awareness raiser, one might say.

And I connect dots.

I guess the only thing left to do, then, is make an Olympic Sport of it…how rock bands break the sound barrier and become as popular in the biggest market. … Thing about that, though, is that there are far more millions and billions of people all over the world who don’t care about AC/DC, anything they’ve done, what they’ve accomplished. Nothing. Billions dislike or hate their music and the fact there are millions who love it more than anything will never outweigh the realities that AC/DC used the market to get them to where they are, and they created and produced for the people who love them.

And when markets and natural human influence do their thing, shit like this happens.

So you have a Finnish bluegrass country band Steve’n’Seagulls covering a popular Australian rock band, AC/DC, doing American-style hard rock & roll, and the cover is American-style country…

Why is this so hard to understand? I’ll give you a clue. As great at that cover is, it only has 175 million views in the 10 years since publishing. That’s great, but it’s not billions. And that’s fine. What fucktaded multiculturalists aim to do is take something that’s pretty cool in micro-cultural formats and scale them to mass public acceptance. But they don’t scale like that. micro-cultural things like break dancing, line dancing, hip-hop, redneck proclivities are embraced or passed up on individual levels and it’s complicated.

The International Olympic Committee, or whatever those miserable fucks call themselves, though break dancing should be an Olympic “sport.” They ended up making a laughingstock of it, and that didn’t need to happen. I wrote in a Xeet.

I haven’t watched one second of the Olympics, and I likely never will again. I advise anyone with a brain to do likewise…but that’s begging the question.

I learned via a social media post that [f-word] BREAK DANCING is an Olympic “sport,” now.

Are you kidding?

Unbridled multiculturalism for fucktards.

Break dancing, or line dancing for that mater, are micro-cultural.

THAT’S the value.

You try to scale it, you make it a laughingstock, and destroy the value, which was perfectly legitimate at micro scale.

Globalists are morons.

… What follows is an AI, Chatbot Zon rework of a post I wrote on this very blog 19 years ago, called, simply, “Culturism.” I asked her to lightly rewrite and expand on it. As you can see, her woke is circumvented. Benefit of membership here. But what do I care? Use woke AI and save the huge cost of membership…

The original post from May of 2005.

Here’s the Sowell bits:

Black Rednecks and White Liberals is a collection of six essays by Thomas Sowell. The collection, published in 2005, explores various aspects of race and culture, both in the United States and abroad. The first essay, the book’s namesake, traces the origins of the “ghetto” African-American culture to the culture of Scotch-Irish Americans in the Antebellum South. The second essay, “Are Jews Generic?”, discusses middleman minorities. The third essay, “The Real History of Slavery,” discusses the timeline of abolition of slavery and serfdom. The last three essays discuss the history of Germany, African-American education, and a criticism of multiculturalism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Rednecks_and_White_Liberals

Here’s the thing. Sowell is a public intellectual, and so he has to do it all in that convoluted way because that’s what has to be done for fucktards pretending to be smart. He can’t just really tell them like it is, and then summarily dismiss anyone who doesn’t want to get it…like I do.

… When I got the gist of what that was all about, I immediately had an aha moment. My second job on the USS Reeves back in 1985 was as a First Lieutenant, the deck officer. This position meant overseeing all the guys who couldn’t pass tests to be sent to school for a rating, like electronics tech, missile tech, radar, damage control tech, boiler technician, or machinery mate, etc. These men, who didn’t select for any of the specific military service ratings, were colloquially called “deck apes.”

It’s not that they lacked intelligence so much—they just didn’t have specialized smarts or lacked integration and application abilities, or they hadn’t been taught that. They were natural generalists. Street smart. Savvy within their own dog-eat-dog realms. So here I was, in charge of a division of about 60-65 men. This group was split roughly half-and-half between what you might call hip-hop or ghetto blacks and white southern rednecks.

As early as 1985, I saw firsthand, day by day, how fundamentally alike and, it must be said, lovable they were. They had an organic camaraderie. They tried to emulate each other: black guys trying to be rednecks and rednecks trying to be hip-hop. I have to admit, I didn’t fully see it at the time. It took me another ten years and reading Thomas Sowell to have a huge aha moment in 2005.

By then, I’d already been chewing on the idea of culturalism. That same year, I wrote that essay on the topic, expanded above, and I’ve never been dissuaded from that view—not in the slightest. What’s more, zero people have ever taken it up, run with it, or critiqued it. You know why? Because racism is a huge industry and there is an association and a correlation and no matter how small, the dishonest will always go with that because they are not fundamentally honest people. They are fundamentally dishonest people, always looking to deceive and scam, which is why extermination is called for.

Where is Noah and his God when you need them?

… Like I always say, all charities and foundations are businesses in disguise. Anytime one of these businesses is anti-something, it means they are deceptively pro—that’s how you stay in the anti-business business. Understand. They are all deceivers. There are no exceptions. There never have been.

I’ll refrain from further digression, to take it up another time. Note this: anything that’s explicitly and primarily tugging at your heartstrings rather than your desires is a fucking scam.

… If you like how I roll, then do yourself a favor and support the work. You’ll feel really good when you do. Promise.