even more quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - a new rolling new york times thread

ooh that looks right up my ex's alley

http://www.vox.com/2015/9/9/9275611/victorian-era-life

fuck. you.

hey man, don't criticize what you can't understand

the times they are a changin'

back

http://www.slate.com/articles/life/history/2015/09/vox_victorians_sarah_a_chrisman_s_essay_on_living_like_a_victorian_is_preposterous.html

fish in a barrel

I did briefly wish tuberculosis on the author after I read that original piece tho tbh

Our heat comes from 19th-century gas heaters and from an antique kerosene space heater.

pls don't call a 21st century fire department to help you out if this goes wrong, it would not be historically accurate

Shakey otm. Also amazing that he writers name is onion.

This is why more people don't follow their dreams: They aren't wealthy and idle

oh but to be

omg this is pure hell to read. though there's something eminently victorian about the blithe dismissal of undesired facts. i was about to start typing all the things about this that made me furious but that rebecca onion piece has already done it much more thoroughly than i could - fish in a barrel, yes, but she knows what she's talking about. only thing i'd add to her (excellent) point that "The “past” was not made up only of things. Like our own world, it was a web of social ties," would be that thing-ish webs, or infrastructures, are also completely missing from their little hameau de la reine: where are they getting the objects in question? how do they reach their house? do they hire somebody to slather horse manure on their clothes when they arrive at the house to simulate the road conditions? do they keep coal burning in the front yard with the windows open to make sure their home and possessions get authentically choked with soot? do they tin their own putrid, upton sinclair beef, wait a while, then re-open it for a hearty meal? actually the only mention of food is the tools used on it, never where it comes from, never how it gets there. i assume they've replaced their plumbing with chamber pots, privies, cesspools seeping into the basement and/or a hired night-soil collector. etc. etc.

really though you couldn't write a more perfect encapsulation of the early 21st century elite: luxuries and authenticity can be had without even having to talk about networks of material and relationships of labor. the victorians they are emulating had servants ffs, and their lovely little devices were made in factories where people got their arms ripped off by machines and power-distributing belts. anybody reading a single one of their precious primary sources would know that. where are the servants, the factory workers, the beggars, the people killed in boiler explosions to serve that natural gas? ahhh, authentic magical victorian gas lamps. not so different from the baffling iPads they've escaped, whose footsteps are similarly erased by distance and aesthetics, right here in 2015. pip pip, quite a dash of fun it all is!

fuck these people and all they represent.

http://the-toast.net/2015/09/10/2012-era-life/

doc casino going in! best dismissal i've read of this piece, so totally otm

http://studentactivism.net/2015/09/10/my-so-called-victorian-life/

Shocking.

doc casino going in! best dismissal i've read of this piece, so totally otm

Ya that was good.

all fair points, but in the end I sort of shrug my shoulders. Almost no one professing to live by the bible or any other holy book actually does so either, but that doesn't in itself make any religion a hateful way of life. They can live in the imagined past of their making and choosing, and be as obtuse as they want about how distinctly contemporary they are by doing so. I do groan a little when they complain about people looking at them funny though, when they go so out of their way to be as different and attract as much attention as possible.

Anyway maybe we're all just cosplaying 21st century consumerists, maaaaan.

They are about as much Victorian as the paleo diet is paleolithic.

Good analogy, although the paleo stuff is slightly more dangerous inasmuch as it relies on and promotes pseudoscience. Although OTOH I've come to accept that certain things like a healthy diet are easier for many people to undertake if they have a story or myth behind them, and paleo diet seems relatively healthy.

https://storify.com/Knitting_Kninja/ranting-about-neo-victorians

Lots of good points here about how this is also suuuuper fucking racist.

i think the victorian stuff is dangerous though. i mean there are political implications to idealizing that particular period of time, or of refusing this crazy mixed-up contemporary world of telephones and talking things. that studentactivism blog carl agatha linked touches on some of this but one could take it further. onion brings up t. jackson lears's work (on the various strains of bourgeois "anti-modernism" in the US at the end of the 19th century) and we could certainly connect the dots from there to plenty of present-day 'conservative' or reactionary political positions and the mobilizing figure of the Good Old Days. but i think the lowercase-p politics of this are the more worrisome. not saying these guys are going to start a movement or something but they represent the tip of a very broad iceberg whose fractal projections we would also find in nostalgic facebook macros and frankly a ton of other stuff ILX treats with contempt - How To Be An Old-Fashioned Man stuff, say. the thing that bugs me most though is this erasure of larger social, material and economic systems. no, it doesn't directly do any harm to forget these things in the act of being a prancing ninny cosplaying victoriana 24/7. or to pine for the 'mad men era' or what have you. but as people talk like this they contribute to this erasure in their actual real lives in 2015. you just buy the right things and you solve all the problems. the things aren't made by anybody and they don't come from anywhere. you solved all the problems.

obv i am not the first or most sophisticated critic of this and maybe the victorian fuckwits are not the perfect target for my frustrations but gawd do they invite mockery. all things considered i'll take neal stephenson's the diamond age. not the most sophisticated take but at least his 21st-century neo-victorians know they are crushing other people under their heels, actively and continuously, to maintain their precious way of life.

xps those Creeping Krisandry tweets are great. makes me almost want to get twitter so i can respond back with high-fives and some favorite additional reading suggestions. jeff wiltse's work on public pools adds further dimension to the swimming trunks bit - the kind of Victorians these folks want to be would have been actively campaigning against the filthy, unsettling sight of working-class men bathing nude in the river, would --- if they were 'progressive' - have been trying to arrange for them to have americanizing, hygiene-enforcing public bath-houses (distinct from the leisure and exercise pools they established for themselves).

but also makes me wish twitter would feature a button that would collapse a billion tweets down to three paragraphs

not even new (http://www.xojane.com/it-happened-to-me/sarah-chrisman-victorian-secrets from 2013) but i guess she has another book coming out?

xp oh I don't know, that seems a little strained. We're not talking about confederate reenactors or plantation fantasists here. Is all hipster beardery, steampunk and old-fashioned cocktail bullshit also inherently racist? Is a 50's sock-hop dance racist? There's a lot of racism today!

that was xp to CA, did not read casino's post yet

I mean I guess you could say all nostalgia is dangerous in some sense

Well it certainly is selective by virtue of convenience

(Irl lol @ pip pip Doc xxxp)

And that selectivity should be acknowledged

there's a range of these things i guess. if these people aspired to the wondrous life of scarlett o'hara, rhapsodizing about how much better things were back then, and never mentioned slavery (and disdained those crackpot ''historians'' with their ''credentials'' and ''interpretations) i feel it'd be pretty self-evident what's going on. all that's different here is that the period being idealized is one without de jure chattel slavery; otherwise it's the same abstraction and vanishing-away of a totally fucked up, racist classist social system. we also have one of those today, where the abstraction and vanishing away for the 1% is done for them in real time by geographically separating the ruling and the ruled (a process on which the victorians made great headway through their signature political project of neo-imperialism). so i just have to go hmmmmm and wonder what's at stake in wanting to turn back the clock 120 years but maintain this total invisibility of everything that makes their precious little life possible. they're basically just morons - very wilfull ones, again note the opening shots fired against historical knowledge - but one can be just a moron and still be dangerous. my only regret in life is that these people will never read my devastating posts on this topic but maybe we can take up a collection to train and employ a telegraph operator.

perhaps we should go back in time and stop them

Lol i'm in

On the telegraph plan that is

We should show up on their lawn in one of these:

http://www.tvandfilmprops.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/PICT5809-time-7.jpg

dressed like this

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/75/a5/92/75a592fc1b5a581bf80240379b8db7b1.jpg

xp oh I don't know, that seems a little strained. We're not talking about confederate reenactors or plantation fantasists here. Is all hipster beardery, steampunk and old-fashioned cocktail bullshit also inherently racist? Is a 50's sock-hop dance racist? There's a lot of racism today!

― on entre O.K. on sort K.O. (man alive), Friday, September 11, 2015 1:56 AM (48 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Did you read the link? It lays it out pretty clearly why this specific thing presented by these specific "neo-Victorians" in the way they present it is specifically racist.

It feels to me like the critical analysis, as true as it is, was hastily cooked up (or linked to) by a lot of commenters to justify the gleeful point-scoring vitriol that preceded it.

Yeah, I prefer the Deadspin response since they're willing to just post a longform fuuuuuuuuck you.

It lays it out pretty clearly why this specific thing presented by these specific "neo-Victorians" in the way they present it is specifically racist.

Fantasies are notoriously disengaged from any kind of reality. imo, this particular fantasy is not specifically grounded in racist longings for a time of white supremacy, even though it is deeply committed to obscuring the racist reality of that era. afaics, it is far more rooted in a willful ignorance of any part of their fantasy about Victorian history that does not satisfy their wish-fulfillment dream life.

They are blind to the worst ugliness of Victorian life for the simple reason that this is an attempt to escape from contemporary ugliness into an imaginary utopia. It's as if they were trying to live in a Medieval Times restaurant full time. Or in a Disney World setting.

The fact that they are so freaking proud of themselves for living in a dream world and strongly recommend it as a bracing tonic is evidence of how divorced from reality they are. They may be racist, but if so, it is just part and parcel of their larger idiocy.

yeah totally. i mean it's not like they just say "we're cosplayers, we like these particular old-timey things, it's this silly little hobby they have!" they're not ren-fest attendees. they advocate for...whatever they think this is they're doing. they've even accepted money from apparently shameless publishers to proselytize for this, on multiple occasions. they are evil and must be stopped.

doctor casino relentlessly OTM, cf those dickheads with their "great gatsby parties"

What is a really random era of history that I can choose to live like? Nothing glamorous, but something weird enough to get someone to write an article about it.

it's the general smell and grubbiness of the past that people never remember to replicate. Even the upper classes didn't wash that much. No double-glazing, everything drafty and horrible.

i mean, even just the surface-level cosplay aspect of this shit is all wrong

the victorian dude giving a lecture on cycling history. that must be a victorian laptop he's reading from....

http://www.thisvictorianlife.com/uploads/4/3/0/9/4309858/3447103_orig.jpg

he also writes about the history of native americans in washington state:

https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/handle/1773/4505

http://depts.washington.edu/civilr/fish-ins.htm

Do they specify whether they live in "Victorian" Washington State specifically or just the general "Victorian era"?

they say they live in a victorian seaport.

dude looks a little like HOOS imo

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/fashion/hobo-chic-from-the-bindle-bros-of-brooklyn.html