#Guy deBoer

[starscelly]

taps from pete

sea@dal 5.15.23 | round 2

[39oa]

BUF@DAL Postgame: Mason Marchment (01.23.23)

[Playing with Roope] felt good. I mean, we had a bunch of chances. I could have buried a couple. Gary had a couple chances, Hintzy had a couple, so. It felt good. We weren't really trapped in our D-zone at all, and it was rolling well.

[kitnita]

this article is a godsend (x) 

[st-just]

In the mid-2000s I lived in Chicago, just a couple blocks from the big gay neighborhood, Boystown. And though I didn’t understand it at the time, when we went out in those years we were seeing the transition of gay culture into Big Gay. My roommates and I would go to this after-hours club called Hydro, which had until recently been a legendary gay bar called Manhole. (Just a top-tier gay bar name, there.) And I once talked to an older guy who pointed to the conversion of Manhole to Hydro as a symbol of how the neighborhood was changing, how it had become sanitized and was now overrun with straights. This was only a year or two after Karl Rove had used gay marriage as a wedge issue to reelect George W. Bush, so homophobia was still prevalent. But the fact that gay marriage was an issue at all spoke to the increasing visibility and salience of the marriage equality movement. And the same cultural processes that made those annoying straights feel comfortable going to get drunk and mingle in Boystown, which an older generation lamented, were making gay marriage possible. Gay marriage gathered steam precisely as the inherently political nature of being gay died. This is what I’m saying to you today: there is no space between normalization and assimilation. They aren’t entangled or related; one doesn’t lead to the other. They are one and the same.

-Freddie deBoer

[quasi-normalcy]

Star Trek series rated by Canadianness!

The Original Series - Shatner's from Montreal; Doohan's from Vancouver; John Collicos (the guy who played Kor, the first Klingon) is from somewhere in Canada; and, um...yeah. 4/10

The Next Generation - So, in the episode "Lower Decks", Lavelle tries to bond with Riker over being from Canada (he's actually from Alaska). Also, Matt Frewer and Saul Rubinek are in episodes. 2/10

Deep Space Nine - I was going to rate this one pretty low since it has pretty much only Nicole deBoer and that one scene where Eddington mentions having a "lucky loonie" to go on, but then I realised that the series was literally premised on a brutal colonial project aimed at mineral extraction, and that's like...the *most* Canadian thing. 7/10

Voyager - WTH is this? No Canadians; nothing particularly Canadian. 0/10

Enterprise - Hoshi Sato wants to take leave in Canada after getting tortured with heat. 1/10

Discovery - Points for being filmed in Canada, and most of the extras and personality-less bridge bunnies being played by Canadians (though points off because the one Discovery novel that I've read keeps emphasizing that Detmer, who has the most personality out of all of them, is from Düsseldorf). Callum Keith Rennie's in the last season. 4/10

Picard - um...Alison Pill is there! 1/10

Lower Decks - Let's see...two of the ships have been named the Vancouver and the Toronto. The plot with Barb Brinson is riffing on having an imaginary girlfriend in Canada (one of our most famous exports). Also, I know this isn't canon, but the comics are done by Ryan North, which has to count for something. 4/10

Prodigy - Man, this series doesn't even air in Canada! -1/10

Strange New Worlds - Filmed in Toronto: actually *set* in Toronto in one episode; retroactively makes Khan Canadian (Khanadian?) which...sure. I'll accept that. Points for casting Edmonton's Bruce Horak as Hemmer, who comes from an ice planet and, as an Aenar, has a generally laid-back, pacifistic attitude towards life (which I think is how a lot of Canadians like to think of themselves); points off for killing him off 9 episodes into the first season. 9/10

[azspot]

Here’s the reality, for women and everyone else: you can’t actually determine someone’s character from their costuming. None of us can see past every mask, every time. If guys who yammer on about how white men need to just shut and listen for awhile were reliably good people, if they never DM’d teenagers or put their hand on a woman’s ass on the subway, the world would be an easier place. But I’m afraid that sometimes Try Guys cheat on their wives with subordinates, and sometimes nice guys are only nice until they can get women into a vulnerable position. Sometimes lunkheaded Joe Rogan-worshipping video-gaming men who complain about woke Star Wars and belong to Barstool’s shirt of the month club are fundamentally moral beings who don’t want to hurt anyone, even if they have stupid politics. And sometimes vice versa to all of that. The point is that you don’t know someone’s character until that character is revealed to you in a way that’s entirely separate from the performed, self-conscious aspects of a person. This, again, is another aspect of human social life that’s made harder in the internet era, given that there is no such thing as an affect-free presentation of the self online. Decency and integrity can only be discovered through the process of actually getting to know someone; they are not superficial virtues but instead deep, in-the-bone qualities that reveal themselves only slowly and with effort. Rebecca Traister doesn’t know Tim Walz’s character, and while sometimes a Try Guy is just a scared man trying to navigate an evolving social world as best he can, sometimes a Try Guy is a predator. You don’t know until you know.

Freddie deBoer

[southshoretides]

Type of Guy Who Fears The Void

On the object level, I think this DeBoer piece correctly identifies a certain type of person (aging white man who self-consciously and showily hates all aging-white-guy pop culture in favor of trying to stay hip), but as the commenters implicitly/explicitly point out, that type of guy is concentrated among the east-coast-grad-educated-tastemaker-social-media-part-time-writer set, i.e. Freddie's milieu, which he often tricks himself into believing is the only milieu in the world. Go to any bar in the Midwest and poll the natives on BTS-vs-Pearl Jam and you'll get different results. (Freddie is of course interminably contrarian relative to whatever his local milieu is, and if fate had brought him to Kansas instead of Brooklyn, he'd be the most red-tribe-hating, pining-for-Brooklyn's-loving-embrace guy on the internet.)

But the meta level of "People recognize that the world naturally puts them in stereotypical boxes and either fight to escape that or wholeheartedly embrace it" is something I think about a lot. That first paragraph was all about different Types of Guy, and that's all it is these days, isn't it? Type of guy, type of guy, type of guy. A whole generation of internet-raised autists can pinpoint your political beliefs based on how you dress or what kind of car you drive. "Guy who makes youtube videos while driving his SUV and wearing wraparound sunglasses" is a different type of guy than "Guy who insists that Carly Rae Jepsen is the best songwriter of the 2010s" but they are politically and culturally opposite Types of Guy, even though there's no rule that says Democrats can't drive SUVs or Republicans can't like Carly Rae Jepsen. But the trend-lines are strong enough that people notice anyway.

@max1461 occasionally gripes about how quickly and thoughtlessly people transpose is-statements with ought-statements, or in other words, take objective factual data about something and try to force it into a prefab narrative. And it certainly is annoying, but to an extent it's like making fun of cavemen for thinking every rustle of grass is a tiger. That's what their environment is giving them, and it's what their brains adapt for. What our environment is giving us is an endless parade of people who eagerly and effusively promote their political and cultural opinions, and eagerly and effusively identify those opinions with such and such group, so no wonder it's so easy for even an amateur to unearth a Type of Guy. No wonder you can look at someone with a Roman-statue avatar and predict with reasonable accuracy his thoughts on young women who dye their hair. And I think this is something the internet makes worse, not better.

I think any objective accounting of the situation would have to conclude that it's easier to be an eccentric in 2023 than in 1993. The internet has allowed weird people to find each other, talk to each other, understand each other and themselves in a way that simply didn't exist before. At the very least, you don't get that "Am I the only human on earth who's like this?" feeling. And the cheap, Hallmark version of diversity/eccentricity is still a popular cultural value: those wall-hangings and birthday cards your aunt buys say "Be Yourself: Everyone Else is Taken", not "Yourself sucks, Be Someone Else." No one wants to be seen as the stodgy, bitter old fart. Part of it, I'm sure, is a cultural thing--Americans seem to obsess over individuality and being one's truest self more than others.

And yet...there's also this ambient sense that eccentricity-in-itself has been devalued in 2023 relative to 1993, at least in my circles. Everything from eccentric tastes in art ("What are you, some kind of hipster filmbro?"), sex ("Of course I'm sex-positive but weird creepy shit doesn't count!") or politics ("You don't really think that, you're just being edgy.") People who value weirdness and eccentricity for its own sake feel hemmed in by people who either openly see it as a threat to their own culture's local hegemony. A lot of the internet really does seem to live by the 'nail that sticks out gets hammered down' and sees that as a good thing. Seems paradoxical.

(For the record, I'm not laying the blame here at any particular subculture. Conservatives blather on about freedom and liberty and then say anyone who refuses to lick an HOA's balls is a dangerous subversive. Progressives say everyone is valid and beautiful and then plaster their spaces with various 'freaks DNI' equivalents, 'freak' status being determined by vibe-centric whisper campaigns. Liberals will Celebrate Diversity up to and no further than the point where it damages quarterly profits. No "name" group is immune to this, really, but certain subgroups are.)

A theory: the normie-weirdo ratio isn't particularly different than it used to be, but the way they interact is different. In the pre-internet days, the weirdos were well aware they were weird, and in having to navigate normie-land with psychological armor on, at least they might come to understand it somewhat. Now, for those who want it, there's an unending stream of validation and insistence that you're perfect the way you are. Without shading into the "can suffering be a good thing if it leads to change for the better?" argument, I think even people who are all-in on the answer being "no" have met at least one person defined by their self-actualization curdling into selfishness and narcissism, to the point where you can't understand how they function, in a way that is directly attributable to a having a stable of pseudonymous online enablers. That's a real phenomenon the way that "Shut up and repress, you freak" is a real phenomenon. They can both suck. They can even both suck in ways that make the other one worse.

The post-mainstream, pre-social-media 'Golden Age' of the internet was when it was basically a playground for weird people. Now everyone's on it by necessity, the weirdo-in-a-small-town dynamics are back, but now the whole world is the small town with the added "no one can ever really escape for good" dynamics of the internet tracking and recording and monetizing every aspect of human interaction.

The weirdos who are old enough to remember when the internet was their turf close ranks and start watching each other for the first signs of Turning Normie--itself something that's antithetical to actually following one's own star and drawing from whatever cultural tradition you find satisfying. The weirdos who aren't old enough grin and bear it because "you're constantly being judged by everyone" is just normal life for them. The stuff that's so popular that liking it puts you in the biggest box possible will benefit; stuff that was never gonna be popular under any circumstances will keep trucking. It's the cultural middle class, as usual, that suffers the most. Again, as I keep emphasizing, this cultural panopticon being both unending and global is unprecedented in human history.

I really think a lot of current cultural neuroses are due to this, although I can't really prove it and don't have the resources to research it. This sense of modern technology revealing to people how fundamentally uninteresting they are and rebelling against it explains a lot to me--the tendency of people to ideologically self-sort to narrower and narrower levels, the uncanny ability of observers to categorize even the relatively-novel versions of those self-sorts, the tendency of some people to just give up and openly embrace everything the hivemind says about them, "be yourself" as a zombified and omnipresent cultural meme when millions of people are struggling existentially with exactly that, every culture absorbing ambient victim-mentality and thinking they're the only right-living people in a world gone mad, the 'cultural class' getting deeper and deeper into objectively-adolescent pop-cultural obsessions and lashing out at the idea they should try something more challenging, the aging-out-of-relevance hipsters Freddie discusses being mortified by the idea of being perceived as exactly that.

The problem, for me at least, is that I understand there is a way out, and if anything it feels worse. I may be a bit younger than the type-case Freddie describes, and am not in an industry where I have to constantly prove my relevance to myself and others, but I am doing the opposite of aging gracefully. Instead of constantly trying to convince my social circle (I don't have a social circle) that having the political, cultural, and artistic preferences of a 21-year-old means I still am one at heart, I engage in the much-healthier practice of spending every waking moment fantasizing being 21 or 18 or, shit, even 14 again. I know nobody really likes getting older. I also think that if everyone was as obsessive and self-loathing about it as I am, society would cease to function. My regrets and pining are definitely unhealthy, obsessive and all-consuming, but I don't really talk about them because there's no way it ends other than "Yeah, that sucks."

But a lot of the people in Freddie's comment section are saying things like "Once I realized I was fundamentally unimportant and my opinions didn't really matter, I could get down to raising my kids/doing my job, which matters more than my feelings." And maybe ten years from now I'll be OK with that. Hell, maybe I'll actually have kids, unlikely as that sounds now. Right now that mindset sounds like a self-administered lobotomy. Maybe I'd be OK with it if I'd actually lived it up in my teens and twenties, tried to become an actual person and discovered what I like about myself, instead of just vaguely Following Rules and assuming there was a payoff to that. Maybe I'd accept that there comes a point in life where my destiny is to be a good parent/worker and that necessarily implies shaving off the hard bits of your personality. Or maybe even the people who were good at being young struggle with getting old. Maybe our cultural/technological moment is just making that a struggle for everyone. Guess I'll never know.

But as we creep closer to no one's parents, then no one's grandparents, remembering a world without the eternal and all-consuming Now of the internet, I suspect I won't be the only one aging with a complete lack of grace, and I suspect we as a culture are completely unprepared to deal with it.

[all-the-fun-of-the-cirkus]

watched prodigal daughter for the first time. nothing makes you appreciate how good an actor nicole deboer is quite like seeing her acting alongside the guys playing ezri's brothers

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Freddie deBoer

Published: Nov 8, 2021

You know personally I’ve been achingly specific about my critiques of social justice politics, but fine - no woke, it’s a “dogwhistle” for racism. (The term “dogwhistle” is a way for people to simply impute attitudes you don’t hold onto you, to make it easier to dismiss criticism, for the record.) But the same people say there’s no such thing as political correctness, and they also say identity politics is a bigoted term. So I’m kind of at a loss. Also, they propose sweeping changes to K-12 curricula, but you can’t call it CRT, even though the curricular documents specifically reference CRT, and if you do you’re an idiot and also you’re a racist cryptofascist. Also nobody (nobody!) ever advocated for defunding the police, and if they did it didn’t actually mean defunding the police. Seems to be a real resistance to simple, comprehensible terms around here. Serwer is a guy who constantly demands that he and his allies be allowed to do politics on easy mode, but he’s just part of a broader communal rejection of basic self-definition and comprehensible terms for this political tendency. Also if you say things they don’t like they might try to beat you up. Emphasis on try.

If you ask these people, are you part of a social revolution?, they’ll loudly tell you yes! Yes they are! They’re going to shake society at its very foundations. Well, OK then -what do I call your movement? You reject every name that organically develops! I’ll use the name you pick, but you have to actually pick one. You can’t just bitch on Twitter every time someone tries to describe your political cohort, which again you yourself say intends to change the world. Name yourself or you will be named.

The basic stance of the social justice set, for a long time now, has been that they are 100% exempt from ordinary politics. BlackLivesMatter proponents have spent a year and a half acting as though their demand for justice is so transcendently, obviously correct that they don’t have to care about politics. When someone like David Shor gently says that they in fact do have to care about politics, and points out that they’ve accomplished nothing, they attack him rather than do the work of making their positions popular. Well, sooner or later, guys, you have to actually give a shit about what people who aren’t a part of your movement think. Sorry. That’s life. The universe is indifferent to your demand for justice, and will remain so until you bother to try to change minds. Nobody gives you what you want. That’s not how it works. Do politics. Think and speak strategically. Be disciplined. Work harder. And for fuck’s sake, give me a simple term to use to address you. Please? Because right now it sure looks like you don’t want to be named because you don’t want to be criticized.

Edit: I might not have underlined this point enough - I sincerely am asking for a better term and would happily use one if offered. If woke, political correctness, identity politics, etc, are inflammatory terms, I'd be happy to substitute something that's not. But surely something is happening in our politics, and we have to be able to talk about it. So I'm asking for a name.

[ Via: https://archive.is/ytzJc ]

==

It's a mistake to think this is accidental. It's not. When it's undefined and unnameable, it's harder to refute and reject, and they don't have to resort to an obvious No True Scotsman.

[starshine-cal]

Why was stankoven just standing behind the net during the powerplay how was that helpful in any way 😭 was he gonna do the Michigan??? (In fact it was actively unhelpful bc he ended up fighting with his own guy for the puck 😅) hey DeBoer what exactly is your plan here 😅

[starscelly]

i’ve seen actually so many people be like “you guys are gonna hate deboer when it comes to playoffs” and other similar sentiments recently but Hey even if thats true At Least It Won’t Be This Anymore !

[39oa]

Robertson Talks All-Star Game (01.06.23)

DeBoer: What a great accomplishment. I've got a tremendous amount of respect for his road to the league, and then to become one of the best players in the world... you know, it's a great example. We've got a couple of 'em on our team: Jamie Benn, Joe Pavelski, Mason Marchment—Marchment never drafted, Joe Pavelski and Jamie Benn late, Robo wasn't a first-round pick. I've got a lot of time and respect for the guys who take the long path to get to the league and then excel. I think it's just about hard work, and it's a great message for all players out there.

Bonus:

[kitnita]

anyway i think part of my personal Thoughts on the guri trade is that we’ve all known it was coming, i’d just deluded myself into thinking jim nill would stray from his old man agenda to go for like …… someone like jesse puljujärvi. if they were just gonna get someone who hasn’t had a great season (no offense to dadonov lmao) it felt like a no-brainer to go for another young rehab project like guri. obviously this trade was 1 for 1 w salary retained or whatever so there’s a tiny bit more cap space now but it just feels so dumb to go for an older player w the same issues guri has just because the coach knows him already. get another young guy who needs a change in scenery!! try not to be so predictable!!!

[st-just]

Freddie deBoer has numerous tics that annoy me deeply but I do appreciate that every so often he looks at his audience and goes 'you guys know I am still a leftist right?' and then gets himself drowned in hatemail defending BDS or trans rights or something. Not a high bar but certainly one the majority of professional 'heterodox leftist contrarian' types fail to clear.

[di--es---can-ic-ul-ar--es]

At the end of the day freddie deboer is like type of guy that would be me if I took writing takes more seriously

[puckinginsane]

I'm going to eat some crow here but deBoer so far hasn't been the nightmare I feared. I really worried about his history of seemingly punishing players (not Babcock bad but bad enough) especially when it came to Otter's development after the history of Fleury in Vegas and Schneider in Jersey and so I was prepared to be disgusted. And while I still don't understand what's going on with Gurianov (not related to the recent family stuff), everyone else seems to be thriving. I know it's still the first year but Jamie seems happier as does most everyone else.

I'm still pissed at the Stars for wasting what should have been the best years of Jamie's and Tyler's careers but I'm tentatively optimistic.

(Neither here nor there, the Winnipeg media is singing Bones' praises and they are currently in first so understandable but I see the commentary. What's currently a plus is likely going to be a liability as time goes on as it was for Dallas.)

Yeah I wasn't sure how it was going to go when they announced the signing. He was coach of the Devils when I used to go to a lot of their games and regularly sat the younger guys when they were struggling (see Adam Larsson and Eric Gelinas) instead of letting them learn by doing and it was frustrating so I was worried about the young guys, honestly. And that whole Vegas goalie situation was so ugly, it's no one's fault for being worried for our young goalie. But I suppose people change and situations change and the team is thriving so far. Some areas still need improvement but it's not a system thing. I hope they con continue to build and be a force consistently throughout the seasons. (Annnnnd winning that big shiny trophy would be awfully nice)

And yeah, Bones worked in Dallas at first to an extent but his system isn't sustainable and even though the guys said he didn't, he lost them and their buy in after a while.