Luke Ford

Steve Sailer writes:

One of the polarizing aspects about Donald Trump is that he doesn’t codeswitch much, the way Obama spoke to black preachers in his black preacher accent while he spoke to whites in his flat Kansas accent (a state he barely has visited, but whom he claims to be from due to his mother having been born there and Kansas seeming particularly non-foreign) rather than in his prep school accent. Hillary has used many accents as well.

Trump talks like a guy from Queens, which he is. Many people, often ones not normally fond of New Yorkers, find Trump’s accent reassuringly authentic. Other people find it alarming. Does his failure to upgrade the class associations of his accent demonstrate that he is defective? Or does it imply that he rejects much of America’s class system? If he doesn’t have the decency to modulate his accent properly, what other social conventions might he not value? Clearly, many people with classier accents find Trump’s accent highly unsettling.

Comments:

* I think that fully half of the horror which the liberal middle classes feel toward Donald Trump is not just from his political views but is engendered by his working class diction. They hated Jesse Ventura for the same reason and Arnold Schwarzenegger too. Conversely those three guy’s manner of speaking was seen as a sign of authenticity by less elite voters.

* I think the anti-Trumpers are more offended by Jeff Session’s accent. He speaks like a nice southern gentleman, which is probably the worst thing you could be in Obama’s America.

* RP sounds evil because it’s exclusive, neo-colonialist and über-white in the minds of liberal and mostly Jewish Hollywood writers. It reeks of privilege and old pre-WWI Europe.

* RP is a young accent in linguistic terms. It was not around, for example, when Dr Johnson wrote A Dictionary of the English Language in 1757. He chose not to include pronunciation suggestions as he felt there was little agreement even within educated society regarding ‘recommended’ forms. The phrase Received Pronunciation was coined in 1869 by the linguist, A J Ellis, but it only became a widely used term used to describe the accent of the social elite after the phonetician, Daniel Jones, adopted it for the second edition of the English Pronouncing Dictionary (1924). The definition of ‘received’ conveys its original meaning of ‘accepted’ or ‘approved’ — as in ‘received wisdom’. We can trace the origins of RP back to the public schools and universities of nineteenth-century Britain — indeed Daniel Jones initially used the term Public School Pronunciation to describe this emerging, socially exclusive accent. Over the course of that century, members of the ruling and privileged classes increasingly attended boarding schools such as Winchester, Eton, Harrow and Rugby and graduated from the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Their speech patterns – based loosely on the local accent of the south-east Midlands (roughly London, Oxford and Cambridge) — soon came to be associated with ‘The Establishment’ and therefore gained a unique status, particularly within the middle classes in London.

* Many of the famous TV anchormen of the past were from west of the Mississippi river but east of California: Cronkite from western Missouri, Brokaw from South Dakota, Rather from Texas.

Brinkley was from North Carolina, however, as was Murrow (but he grew up in Washington state).

My vague impression is that a slightly country accent was helpful in the TV business a couple of generations ago. It seemed to me as if the famous national newscasters generally had less neutral accents than were then common in Los Angeles.

* Tom Wolfe has a great bit in The Right Stuff where he talks about the Chuck Yeager Voice:

Anyone who travels very much on airlines in the United States soon gets to know the voice of the airline pilot… coming over the intercom… with a particular drawl, a particular folksiness, a particular down-home calmness that is so exaggerated it begins to parody itself… the voice that tells you, as the airliner is caught in thunderheads and goes bolting up and down a thousand feet at a single gulp, to check your seat belts because ‘uh, folks, it might get a little choppy’… 

Who doesn’t know that voice! And who can forget it, – even after he is proved right and the emergency is over. That particular voice may sound vaguely Southern or Southwestern, but it is specifically Appalachian in origin. It originated in the mountains of West Virginia, in the coal country, in Lincoln County, so far up in the hollows that, as the saying went, ‘they had to pipe in daylight.’ In the late 1940s and early 1950s this up-hollow voice drifted down from on high, from over the high desert of California, down, down, down, from the upper reaches of the [Pilot] Brotherhood into all phases of American aviation. It was amazing. It was Pygmalion in reverse. Military pilots and then, soon, airline pilots, pilots from Maine and Massachusetts and the Dakotas and Oregon and everywhere else, began to talk in that poker-hollow West Virginia drawl, or as close to it as they could bend their native accents. It was the drawl of the most righteous of all the possessors of the right stuff: Chuck Yeager.

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* I thought that Trump’s inaugural speech was terrific.

It was philosophically precise, coherent, and deep, and presented a clear and compelling vision.

Once again, I’m struck by how much sense Trump’s views in aggregate make — with a few exceptions — given how anti-intellectual he seems to incline. What it suggests is that the first impulses of common sense in matters of moral and political value — which Trump embodies — are the most reliable. Abstraction seems to be the enemy of the Good.

* What I liked about it was that it boiled class warfare rhetoric down to the Washington class versus everyone else, which is how it should be. That, and repeating the phrase “America first!” Which triggers goodthinkers.

Like most all political speeches it was vague and largely beside the point. A series of sounds to make us feel good. But if he’s serious about being Action Man, and us judging him by what he does instead of what he says, oh, happy day.

Trump's speech was as masculine as Gay Mullato's speeches are feminine. Make America High T Again.https://t.co/cbwwQ3jIPx

— ≠Chateau Emissary≠ (@ChateauEmissary) January 20, 2017

* Trump articulated a clear vision (America First) and discussed concrete things he plans to accomplish.

I thought it was beautiful in its directness and simplicity.

The people on TV said it was terrible because it wasn’t “soaring.” Something tells me they never worked in a factory and probably don’t know anyone who does.

* 1. Christianity given priority in the public square.

2. Melania Trump is really, really good-looking.

3. Very pugilistic, populist tone in his inaugural speech. He is bearding the lion in his den. No wonder the US Deep State (such as it is) hates him so much.

4. This is not just the second, but the third Act in Donald Trump’s American life. Pretty astounding.

* It’s the first inaugural address I’ve ever heard that has ever touched me in any way, and it touched me deeply. I honestly never before felt like politicians gave a damn about working American families, and it sounded to me very much like he did. I also didn’t anticipate that having someone in power who will look out for people like me and mine would actually make me feel any different, but it does. It’s a potent mixture of gratitude and hope.

He set a very high bar for himself.

Comments at Steve Sailer:

* Sane men do not allow women into positions of major authority or influence in society.

From Nancy Pelosi to Madonna to Michelle Obama to Ruth Bader Ginsberg to this authoress Livingstone we can detect a pattern of estrogen fueled insanity.

The first female billionaire made her money on a body shaping girdle design that fools men into thinking that older women are much younger/healthier than they actually are… ’nuff said.

* Drudge pic top center of Ryan, Melania and Trump and the big view of DC in the background is funny. Trump is staring at his new hotel which is clearly visible (hotel tower is second highest structure in DC).

We only see the back of Trump’s head in the pic but we know what he’s thinking. The two phallic symbols on the skyline are worrisome for Trump. His hotel tower does not measure up… what is to be done?

* Well, you have to remember that entire departments of the major universities have been retrofitted to teach the primary skill of being offended. The first major wave of students are coming out and writing for major periodicals.

We’ve never seen a cohort so broadly and skillfully adept at finding offense that to laymen like you or I would find boringly innocuous. We’re talking the greatest minds of our generation spending a decade or more in training at being offended. It’s no wonder the state of the art in the field is so advanced.

* How many feminists are into feminism these days because it’s like a magical, invisible choke collar that works on about 50% of the men in the West and makes them sit and roll over on command?

Those men who kowtow to feminists think that by doing so they will make the women less angry and more agreeable. Instead, it just makes the women more angry and demanding to them—because the women have realized that acting like a feminist just got them power over the kowtowers, and they want to push it to the limit.

You never see feminists getting away with this routine on non-feminist men. They make a go at it, but after they’re laughed/shouted down they either run away or magically start acting much more pleasantly and coquettishly.

If men collectively stopped kowtowing (impossible, I know), then women suddenly find much more pleasant methods of getting things out of them. Those PUAs and old tests aren’t wrong when they both agree that the way to have a happy wife/lover is to give her no quarter and have a firm hand.

P.S. this is much like how blacks have learned that merely yelling “racism” gets them a bunch of free gifts and sympathy. If we all collectively stopped jumping when they screamed “discrimination!”….

* Think of the three bumps in the middle, far side of the Potomac River. Roslyn, Arlington, Virginia. Due West is Tyson’s Corner in Fairfax, Virginia. Between the two, Trump will one day have a tower on the far side of the river and he’ll see THAT from where he’s pictured. The Old Post Office will not change. But Trump will own the tallest of the tall in the DC region before it’s over. No one in the region will deny him and besides, he already owns an enormous golfing spread in Loudon County, Virginia, probably to be his Washington home course. No Andrews AFB for Trump. In any case, Trump is a man who, unlike Obama, will not find himself closed out by the bigs in this country. He will play Augusta National, Congressional, Pebble, he will be welcome wherever he goes. And his tower in Virginia will be the tallest in the land.

Off topic even further, it’ll be good to have a pair in the White House for once, instead of a Madcap W or lately, this cardboard cutout masquerading as a clean and articulate rent-a-black. Obama is going to find himself a very lonely guy in DC, an annoying rock in the collective shoe of DC. He’s picturing himself as a broker or kingmaker of some sort, certainly an earner in the speechmaking bizz, but I think not. He has no influence to sell, his intellect small, his hallucination over, this, a disservice done by the liberal party and press to puff him up only to use him and leave him behind for the next big thing. And then Obama will know it was all an illusion, it was handed to him, he isn’t nearly as large as presented or pictured.

* A key tenet of multiculturalism is that no culture is better than another, despite the rather glaring evidence that this is patently absurd. So any verbiage about encouraging groups with less successful cultural practices to adopt those of more successful ones must be denounced…unless it’s progressives insisting that the only thing minority children need to succeed is to be able to live and go to school with more white children. That’s about magic dirt, not the way white people live their lives.

* Being a weed grower in Mendocino County it pays to be a bit aware of the racial component. Many folks with fabulous tans are the vast majority of home invasions up here. Too lazy to grow it themselves. Very labor intensive in the outdoors. so yeah, weed growers in wine country probably aren’t real aggressive in cultivating a relationship with the brothers.

* Websites like The New Republic don’t allow comments on their articles because they’re too civilized to soil their forums with commentary from the unwashed, uneducated lower classes. That, and they know that dimwit ditzes like Joe Livingstone are incapable of writing defensible screeds.

* More of the White Civil War. Its choose a side, all the time. No place or group will be exempt. None.

Look at Jews — the price of being accepted into Leftist groups is anti-Israel, anti-Trump. Trump is quite likely to move the embassy to Jerusalem today. Just to make a point. And if he does so, the journey of Leftist Jews into overt anti-Israeli sentiment will be complete. Which btw shows how bankrupt anti-Semitism really is — the most important thing to Leftist Jews is being part of Leftism and the career advancement nepotism it offers, Israel, their relatives, their heritage mean nothing. Just as those WASPy leftists like Hillary or Elizabeth Warren behave.