Perhaps you missed the subtitle: With his unconventional take on children’s television, Mr. Rogers helped redefine the male role model.
The point of the piece: Mr. Rogers provides a model of maleness and masculinity that works especially well for boys and men who feel scared, alienated, or attacked by society. This model, rooted in love, contrasts with other models for that subpopulation that ground out in anger or hate.
In other words, the very thesis of the piece is that there is a salient relationship between incels/mysogyny and Mr. Rogers: the latter provides an alternative to the former.
"Low-trust" "multicultural" "society" is race-war code language, isn't it? People that don't read a lot of reactionary stuff might try to engage directly with the words "low-trust" and spark a whole unproductive discussion about what it is we "trust" or "don't trust" about people, but that's not the purpose the words actually serve in that sentence, right? "Low-trust" is a way of saying "things were better when we were mostly white Europeans, with other cultures marginalized".
If that wasn't your intention, you'd probably want to know that putting the words "low-trust" and "multicultural" into assertions about American life constitutes a reactionary/neo-supremacist trope.
>"Low-trust" "multicultural" "society" is race-war code language, isn't it?
Says you, they're just words. If you don't agree you can go ahead and disagree. I won't comment about your rhetoric other than to say it's functionally ad-hominem. Calling something a trope is a also a pretty easy way to hand-wave away anything you don't want to think about.
>and spark a whole unproductive discussion about what it is we "trust" or "don't trust" about people
I would say that trust has not improved, I would say that race relations have not improved (probably deteriorated). Even you can probably agree with that?
Mr. Rodgers prescriptions for life are lovely but impractical, and they haven't helped society at all I would say.
I won't comment about your rhetoric other than to say it's functionally ad-hominem.
Wait, how? It's specifically about your language, not you. If, hypothetically, he'd taken a little scroll through your older comments and happened to, purely hypothetically, run across some stuff about how slaves had room and board and the persistent racist oppression of white males and then jumped to a conclusion and called you a racist, that would be ad hominem.
> I would say that race relations have not improved (probably deteriorated).
Since Mr. Rogers Neighborhood first aired in 1968? No, race relations are much better now. It's true that they've deteriorated in some respects in the last handful of years, but mostly that's a result of a desperate rearguard action by White supremacists as institutionalized racism and it's automatic acceptance by the masses has been further eroded, and even if the federal government role today is in some respects worse than in 1968, the overall state of race relations is not.
> Mr. Rodgers prescriptions for life are lovely but impractical
In what concrete respect? You've been waving around a lot of generalizations (false ones, at that) about societal differences between now and the past to explain why they might have become impractical having been valid in the past, but you haven't actually explaining what the actual impracticality in any of them is (or even what specific prescriptions you are criticizing); while the inaccuracy of your generalizations is a problem, a bigger problem is your failure to establish, or even concretely define, the problem that supposedly has developed with Rogers’ approach that you are using them to explain.
> I would say that race relations have not improved
The proportion of interracial marriages as a proportion of all marriages has been increasing since, such that 15.1% of all new marriages in the United States were interracial marriages by 2010 compared to a low single-digit percentage in the mid 20th century. Public approval of interracial marriage rose from around 5% in the 1950s to around 80% in the 2000s. The previous sentences are copy-pasted from Wikipedia.
I know what his name is and how to spell it I just reflexively spell it that way. Why don't you just write that you think I'm stupid rather than hide behind this trivial spelling error comment?
The only point I am making is that this person has attempted to take a thread about Mr. Rogers on a race-war tangent, and if they're going to do that, they should at least know how to spell his name. I have no idea whether they're intelligent or not; I just know that they're unserious about the topic of the thread.
> Mr Rogers came about in a homogeneous high-trust society.
No, he didn't. The United States was neither homogeneous nor high-trust in 1968. In fact, it was about as far from that as it ever has been in the post-WWII period, present situation not excluded.
Oh so Mr. Rodgers winked into existence in 1968? I suspect that instead that he was born much earlier than that, and he lived and grew up in a very different USA than the one you live in now, and even a different USA from the one in which he began broadcasting in 1968.
I addressed what you said. If you had a point beyond that, it wasn't apparent.
> but I'll address yours:
No, you won't, even though my point was exactly what I said.
> Could those social, political and racial divisions be addressed by living in different polities?
That's not really germane to what I said, either on its own or in its context as a response to your claim about change since some time relevant to Mr. Rogers origins. It seems to be more a passive aggressive way of making a separatist point that your use of white nationalist code throughout the year has been trying to dance around rather than actually responding to any point of mine. But, I will respond to it:
(1) No, the divisions are to multidimensional and evolving for separar polities to be a viable solution; and, in any case, separate polities just shift internal conflict to external conflict, they don't resolve conflict except when the conflict is primarily about a desire for separate polities.
(2) While there have been occasional bits of retrograde, the broad course over time does that they can be, and largely are being, addressed without separate polities.
I disagree that internal conflict would become external as you say. I think that the reverse would happen, we could coexist more peacefully as no groups feel controlled or exploited by the other.
Also I'm not sure what the reason you insist that people you clearly hate must continue to live with you. There is the obvious fact that you can continue to control them and demographically dominate them at the polls (thanks to immigration). If they separate from you then you cannot do that, also you would become a very tiny minority in the multicultural society that remained, I think that doesn't sit well with you. My assumption is that you are white.
I suspect the opposite, the trend is getting worse and relations are becoming a powderkeg. I suppose time will tell who is correct.
> Also I'm not sure what the reason you insist that people you clearly hate must continue to live with you
I don't hate anyone, and I don't insist anyone “live with me”. The U.S. does not have exit controls nor do I favor imposing them. OTOH, the primary cleavage lines in the country aren't geographic (whike there is a geographic correlation, it's weaker than at any point in history), so any separation of poltiies means (even ignoring the multidimensional nature of the divided that make this impractical even before considering geography) either forcing large numbers of people into polities less friendly to themselves than the current common polity or mass dislocation.
> There is the obvious fact that you can continue to control them and demographically dominate them at the polls (thanks to immigration).
The idea that currently dominant faction is advantaged by immigration is...interesting. But not particularly well connected to reality for many of the major divides at issue.
> If they separate from you then you cannot do that, also you would become a very tiny minority in the multicultural society that remained
In a separation along any of the key cleavages, everyone would be part of a larger (proportional) group within the resulting poltiies than the source polity, so that doesn't even make sense.
> My assumption is that you are white.
Well, maybe you shouldn't make stupid assumptions.
> I suspect the opposite, the trend is getting worse and relations are becoming a powderkeg.
I think there's a fairly good chance of a near term crisis and it's clear that the short-term trend is bad, as it has often been within the longer-term improvement. OTOH, The major progress has always come in the context of crisis periods.
Mr. Rogers started broadcasting in 1968, the same year MLK was assassinated.
Mister Rogers Neighborhood was airing during the LA riots, during the Attica riots, during the height of Vietnam, during 9/11, during Watergate, etc.
Issues of racial resentment and hatred were dealt with, head on, by Mr. Rogers in Mister Rogers Neighborhood.
The television series continued until 2001, a year when the cultural and racial makeup of the USA was very similar to what it is today. The core message remained the same.
I don't know about trust being the root. But the argument can be made that society is very different. And the Fred Rogers model won't have much of an impact given the environment of hyper stimulation/24x7 distraction that consumption culture creates.
Fred Rogers was critical of it even back then. Since then, consumption culture has exploded, objectification of women, violence, escapism whether it is in games, drugs or your social media, news streams is at an all time high. For a Fred Rogers type message to get through the volume dial on all this other stuff has to be dialed down. Otherwise the very valuable message gets lost in the noise.
I'd be curious to read any studies on child psychology with respect to how children would respond to something like Fred Rogers today. As in, would a child today be disinterested in the slow pace of that format and want to consume other media?
The point of the piece: Mr. Rogers provides a model of maleness and masculinity that works especially well for boys and men who feel scared, alienated, or attacked by society. This model, rooted in love, contrasts with other models for that subpopulation that ground out in anger or hate.
In other words, the very thesis of the piece is that there is a salient relationship between incels/mysogyny and Mr. Rogers: the latter provides an alternative to the former.