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BahRamYou


				

				

				

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				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
NPR is in the news lately. First because they have a new CEO, who tweets like a parody of white liberal women. OK those were "in the past" but they were only 4-8 years ago... has she matured at all since then? So far no sign of that.


Secondly was this essay by Uri Berliner, their longtime senior business editor, creator of the popular "Planet Money" podcast, and one of the very few white males/not-super-liberals still in a position of authority at NPR. I really recommend this essay. He lays it out how, sure, NPR was always left-leaning, but it had intelligence and integrity. It's changed.




In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.


If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way.


But it hasn’t.




...




Back in 2011, although NPR’s audience tilted a bit to the left, it still bore a resemblance to America at large. Twenty-six percent of listeners described themselves as conservative, 23 percent as middle of the road, and 37 percent as liberal.


By 2023, the picture was completely different: only 11 percent described themselves as very or somewhat conservative, 21 percent as middle of the road, and 67 percent of listeners said they were very or somewhat liberal. We weren’t just losing conservatives; we were also losing moderates and traditional liberals.




He was suspended for writing that essay (edited- he has since been made to resign: https://archive.is/YR3LB). NPR claims it's not about the content, they just don't allow their workers to write for outside publications without permission. Benjamin Mullin has the story in the New York Times


(edited to remove something wrong)


For my own part, I grew up listening to NPR and I used to love it. The voices, the production value, the journalism, all of it was high-quality. It really stood out in the world of FM radio, where everything else is staticky, ad-filled garbage, and tends to play the same basic pop-classic rock-rap top 40 garbage over and over. In the world before podcasts and sattelite Radio, NPR was the only halfway intellectual content on the radio. Now it just feels like a podcast from some random student activists who have been triggered by Trump to the point that they're on the verge of a psychotic breakdown. I seriously can't stand listening to it anymore, it's just amazing how deranged and annoying it's become.


If you want more examples, Peter Boghossian has a series of podcasts about it: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYNjnJFU-62s5cNuqeB-D-7QPymF6myk_. I'm guessing that most of this won't be very shocking to the people here. But still, it's nice to feel like "I'm not alone. there really are a lot of other people who used to like NPR and now hate it."


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				How Should We Think About Race And "Lived Experience"?
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
All I can think is that every single person in this story was terrible.


The professor, who had some vague family story about her great-grandmother being an Indian, and turned that into the core of her identity. Zero attachment to any of her other 7 great-grandparents, who were all just "white." (no indication of country or culture or anything)


Her friends and coworkers, for instantly exiling her and cutting her off. No defense of her like "well actually she's still a really good professor."


The university, for creating this spoils system of prestigious tenured professorships, reserved exclusively for those with special blood.


Society at large, for meekly going along with all this and not doing anything.


...But sure, the real problem is "blurry definitions." In the future, the prestigious Indian Studies professorships should be reserved only for those who have passed an official blood test.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


So while I too feel that there are greater problems in the world, I get why a lot of men would like sexiness to just go away and stop taunting them




That's pretty much how I feel. At least, in environments where it's frowned upon to flirt with women, like in the office, I really wish they would stop wearing sexy clothes. It's like a constant mental tax I have to pay, "don't look at her don't look at her don't look at her," and there's no way to complain about it without sounding like either a huge pervert or an overbearing puritan.


I feel like food is maybe the gender-switch version? As a guy, I like chocolate, but I can take it or leave it. I have no trouble just eating one chocolate and ignoring the rest. But there was a holiday party at my office, and some woman sent in a complaint to HR, crying that she just couldn't stop eating the chocolate, it was making it impossible for her to work and maintain her diet with all these scrumptious chocolate lying around in front of her all day. And I was thinking... woman, you have no idea...


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


token discussions of "diversity" or minority rights while completely eliding any structural issues or suggestions for real leftist/progressive reform




There's nothing "token" about it, that's their central framing for basically every single story. It's relentless. I do agree that they elide any real structural issues or serious suggestions for reform, but that's because it's all so stupid that they don't think to ask those questions.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Friday Fun Thread for January 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Want to read an interesting wiki bio?


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


I feel like you could take almost any paragraph of that and it makes an interesting story. People just don't live like that anymore!


    

  • started his career at the age of 13, on a slave ship
    • 

  • after a few years, started to feel bad about the whole slavery thing and suddenly resigned while in Jamaica
    • 

  • Started a new career on a normal ship from a lower position, but instantly got promoted to captain (at age 21) because the captain and first mate died
    • 

  • "This came to an end, however, when he killed a mutinous crew member with a sword in a dispute over wages." Flees to America
    • 

  • Somehow makes friends with the Continental Congress and is given command of a ship
    • 

  • Leads a raid on his own hometown. Raid fails because they ran out of lantern fuel, went to a pub to get more, and "the temptation to stop for a quick drink led to a further delay"
    • 

  • Goes to plunder some nearby Earl instead
    • 

  • Gets given a larger ship as a reward. Famous battle ensues. Probably didn't really say the quote that's famous for, but it's a good story nonetheless.
    • 

  • War ends, the US can't afford a navy anymore, so Jones has nothing to do. Goes to Russia instead, and is instantly promoted to admiral despite not speaking any Russian
    • 

  • Somehow defeats a larger Turkish fleet despite the crappy Russian fleet and his translation issues
    • 

  • Sneaky Prince Potemkin steals all the credit from Jones. He loses his job again.
    • 

  • He gets accused of raping a 10-year-old girl.
    • 

  • Catherine the Great personally intervenes to make sure the trial goes forward
    • 

  • Jones tries to defend himself by saying that he thought she was 12, not 10, that he had paid her but not raped her, and that the girl's mother "lived in a brothel, and was herself promiscuous." Not the best defense there by modern standards Jones...
    • 

  • After that he really can't get a job, so he makes money by publishing his memoirs. James Fenimoore Cooper and Alexandre Dumas both write adventure novels based on his life.
    • 

  • Died in a random French cemetary, unknown and forgotten
    • 

  • But... luckily (?) some random French guy paid to have his body mummified
    • 

  • In 1905 a French general spends 6 years tracking down his body and eventually finds it.
    • 

  • His body is exhumed, placed in an elaborate sarcophagus, and now rests in the US Naval Academy
    • 

  • FDR tries to write a screenplay about his life, but it's rejected by Hollywood. I didn't know that FDR wrote screenplays...
    • 



Just a wild life from start to finish. I liked this quote from his biography summarizing him:




"In sum, Jones was a sailor of indomitable courage, of strong will, and of great ability in his chosen career. On the other side of the coin, it must be admitted that he was also a hypocrite, a brawler, a rake, and a professional and social climber. Although these elements of his character do not detract from his feats at sea, they do, perhaps, cast in doubt his eligibility for a prominent place in the ranks of America's immortals."




				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I do miss that old internet culture.


It sounds like this guy was, weirdly, ahead of the game in a lot of ways. He realized that the internet was important as a source of serious information, when most other people were just using it to goof around. He was willing to stand up and be a public figure, writing everything under his real name. Pretty common now on substack and celebrity twitter, but very rare back then. And he was willing to fight for all the causes that have became left-wing staples, completely avoiding the libertarian flavor of the earlier internet days.


If he hadn't wasted so much time and effort on that stupid RationalWiki site (I had no idea it was mostly all just one guy writing it), he'd probably be a famous influencer or political pundit now.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				[AstralCodexTen]Book Review: The Origins of Woke
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


There is no “true” set of races that “falls out naturally” from genetic or cultural data, but the US government’s system was especially fake and embarrassing.
they declared Hispanics to be an “ethnicity” that you could have along with a different race.




I've heard stuff like this before, that Hispanic is a nonsense category. But I actually think it makes sense, at least as far as anything makes sense in the US legal/cultural system of race.


First, just to state the obvious: this wasn't ever intended to be a rigorous, comprehensive, scientific system. It's just a quick and dirty way to classify people, in a way that any average person on the street can see and more-or-less agree on. You don't want to make up dozens of separate specific categories because that quickly spirals into confusion.


Second, look at the history. Hispanics, in the US, come mostly from Latin America (not from Spain!). And Latin America was colonized long before the US, and much more brutally. One of the very first things Columbus did was to immediately start taking slaves! And on the other side, explorers such as Magellan's expedition were, um, not exactly celibate:




The crew also found they could purchase sexual favours from the local women. Historian Ian Cameron described the crew's time in Rio as "a saturnalia of feasting and lovemaking"




This quickly led to a situation where Latin America was a mix of white conquistadors, indigenous slaves, black slaves imported from Africa, and mixed-race offspring who had grown up there. Pretty soon the Spanish realized they needed some sort of classification system for who was going to be a slave, who was trustworthy enough to rule, and who was somewhere in-between. Eventually they came up with a rather byzantine system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mestizo#Mestizo_as_a_colonial-era_category






    

  • Español (fem. española), i.e. Spaniard – person of Spanish ancestry; a blanket term, subdivided into Peninsulares and Criollos
    • 

  • Peninsular – a person of Spanish descent born in Spain who later settled in the Americas;
    • 

  • Criollo (fem. criolla) – a person of Spanish descent born in the Americas;
    • 

  • Castizo (fem. castiza) – a person with primarily Spanish and some American Indian ancestry born into a mixed family.
    • 

  • Mestizo (fem. mestiza) – a person of extended mixed Spanish and American Indian ancestry;
    • 

  • Indio (fem. india) – a person of pure American Indian ancestry;
    • 

  • Pardo (fem. parda) – a person of mixed Spanish, Amerindian and African ancestry; sometimes a polite term for a black person;
    • 

  • Mulato (fem. mulata) – a person of mixed Spanish and African ancestry;
    • 

  • Zambo – a person of mixed African and American Indian ancestry;
    • 

  • Negro (fem. negra) – a person of African descent, primarily former enslaved Africans and their descendants.
    • 



Which made sense for their situation, but  stops making sense once you abolish slavery and royal titles and all these people start to intermix with each other. So after a few hundred years of that, you end up with modern day Hispanic people. Some are mostly white, some are mostly black, some are mostly indigenous, but a lot of them are a roughly even mix of all three, to the point where it's an obvious group of its own. You still can't exactly call it a race- it's a mix of other races, and it's hard to tell where exactly is the border between Hispanics and one of the other races. But you can't just say "mixed-race" either, for something that's been so thoroughly mixed for hundreds of years. So they made up a new word, "ethnicity", and called it a day.


Of course all this is awkward to talk about in polite society, and most Americans don't really know the history of Latin America. In Mexico they call it La Raza which makes a lot more sense, but that sounds bad in English and the term hasn't made it here yet. So they decided to classify it on language, "are you from a Spanish-speaking area?" That's... weird, since it includes white people from Spain and excludes people from Brazil or Belize. But it works well enough for the US, where most Latin-American immigrants are from Spanish-speaking areas.


It's certainly not a perfect term, and I think we're moving towards changing it with weird postmodern terms like LatinX or Chicano, but it's good enough for 99% of situations to get the idea across. It's actually a lot less confusing than African (eliding the difference between North, West-sub-Saharan, and East-Sub-Saharan African) or Asian (it's a big continent lol) or white (are Arabs white?). It's also (like all racial data in the US) mostly self-reported. But I challenge you- find a person who self reports as "Hispanic," ask the average person to draw a sketch or select a picture, and see how well it matches. Most of the time, it's pretty close.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 12, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think this is the inevitable result of making college the default path, where most people feel that they need a college degree for the job market even if they have no interest in being there. And the colleges are happy to serve as a diploma mill.


A long time ago I worked as a math tutor for my college, working with freshman who were struggling wtih basic math. And it was pretty clear that most of them had no interest in learning math, they just wanted me to do their homework for them so they could pass the class. I tried to teach them if I could but... it's a lot easier to just do the homework yourself than to teach someone else. So I was basically serving as a "living LLM" in that case.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Is this the beginning of a popular rebellion against woke Hollywood garbage?


Like (I imagine) a lot of you, I got fed up with mainstream Hollywood movies and TV a long time ago. For various reasons, but a big part of it was how they insisted on inserting heavy-handed woke propaganda into everything, even where it made no sense. I'm hardly the first to complain about that, but it seemed to be mostly anonymous online reactionaries complaining, while mainstream critics and everyone "respectable" still lapped it up. The Star Wars sequels, Nu-Trek, and all Marvel movies made $$$$$$$ while also gathering rave critical reviews, even though it became something of a joke when the "audience score" on rotten tomatoes was always so much lower than the "critic reviews" score.


And to be clear, I'm not (just) mad at those things because I disagree with their politics. I genuinely think those are terrible movies. They have bad plots, bad characters, bad dialogue, and often even bad at basic filmmaking stuff like editing, camera angles, and sound mixing. One theory I like is that, for quite a while, Hollywood was so focused on exporting big famous brands to foreign countries that they didn't care how it sounded in English. They'd all be watching it dubbed or with subtitles anyway, and then (hopefully) buying merch. But for a long time I felt like I couldn't say these things without getting labelled as a deranged culture warrior.


But now? I dunno. I'm seeing more and more open criticism of big hollywood brands, and some of it is coming from people who are not easily dismissed. Examples:



The last one was what inspired me to write this post. Lots have people have already criticized Star Trek over the years, most notably the RedLetterMedia guys who kinda got famous from it. But I associate most of them with the online right. This is a 4 hour review from someone who doesn't normally do movie reviews, and she felt compelled to keep saying how she normally loves seeing pro-diversity left wing messages in Star Trek. But it's such an amazingly bad series that even its target audience can't defend it. I'm not woke, but I used to love Star Trek as a kid. Picard season 1 was so terrible I refused to watching anything after that, and it made me completely hate the franchise as a whole. I know that "some people say" that it got better, or that some other new Star Trek shows are good, or whatever. I don't care, I hate that pile of garbage so much that I'm never giving them another dollar or view unless they publically apologize for it. It felt like someone (maybe Patrick Stewart? Maybe Alex Kurtzman? Maybe all the Star Trek actors who have been stuck doing silly conventions with crazy fans for decades?) genuily hated their fanbase and wanted to give them the finger.


I don't know. Maybe I'm being too optimistic here. But I feel like we've finally crossed the threshold where everyone is fed up with Hollywood's crap. They've taken pretty much every bit of pop culture we loved as children, and burned it all down to make a quick buck. They kept recycling the same crap in their little clique of Jewish Hollywood elites and refused to listen to any criticism. You can only keep doing that for so long before the audience gets sick of it.


And at long last, we can finally agree that the new Star Trek movies are bad, right?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think it's stupid when people bring up one random no-context tweet or private joke and use it as an excuse to cancel someone. That's not really what this is though. It's a whole series of tweets, stretching across years, which perfectly match her entire career and worldview. This is who she is.


Also, there's no real pressure on her yet besides people on right-wing twitter dunking on her. She's still very much in charge. It's her underling who got fired because of one essay (admittedly an essay where he publicly broadsided the entire organization).


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This feels like one of the most boring presidential elections of my lifetime. So far it's mostly about Trump's personal scandals and Biden's age, both things that we've known and discussed already for what feels like forever. And it's frustrating, because like you said there are lot of big dramatic issues that we could be talking about. But neither of the parties seems to really want to talk about them in a clear way. There's been zero discussion of things like:


    

  • were the lockdowns were justified
    • 

  • why does the birth rate keep falling
    • 

  • why are we banning TikTok and not everything else
    • 

  • Are we going to give Ukraine air power to actually win the air, pull out and let the Europeans handle it, or just keep drip-feeding them leftover ammo from the 70s so they can fight forever but never win?
    • 

  • Are we just gonna keep supporting Israel forever, no matter what?
    • 

  • Are we actually willing to fight China over Taiwan, or are just kinda giving up on that?
    • 

  • Why do house, education, and healthcare prices just keep rising forever?
    • 

  • What's the point of college education if technology is automating all the educated professional jobs? It seems like what we need now are blue-collar and service-sector workers, not more office drones
    • 



But this is not discussed. Both candidates seem pretty similar, honestly- they both want to more or less leave things as they are, with just minor disagreements over taxes and trade policy. Fair enough, maybe it'll be good to have a boring election for once. This reminds of Clinton vs Dole in 96, which was a match between an incumbent vs a very old senator, with most of the debate being around Clinton's personal scandals.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
As I understand it, this is already a standard tactic used by large law firms to crush individual lawyers. They don't need LLM, they just hire a ton of new lawyers to churn out vast amounts of legal documents. A single lawyer trying to fight a lawsuit against them would get buried, because he just can't physically read all of that stuff and respond in any human lifetime, and if he can't respond he loses by default.


Big corporations also do this as a defense mechanism. So you want to sue them, and they're required to turn over the relevant docs? Oh they'll do that... but the "relevant docs" are like a million pages of garbage. Again, only a giant law firm has the resources to actually read through all of it and process it effectively. DDOS via human bureaucracy.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 24, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


However, perhaps most of all, I think many Americans just don't realise how visceral and close and frightening the Ukraine war is for many people in Europe.




Is it? My impression is that, even for most Europeans, the Ukraine war just isn't all that important. The real hot button issue seems to be immigration, or maybe just the economy in general. No one in Europe is massively raising defense spending, activating the draft, getting nuclear weapons, or calling for a pan-Europian army. I'd expect to see all of those things if they felt they were seriously on the edge of a Russian invasion. The only countries who are really acting like they're at war are the former Warsaw Pact countries like Poland and Bulgaria.


I guess we'll see if the new German government wants to massively increase military aid to Ukraine. If they do then, I'll be proven wrong. But I think they'll basically keep it to the same level it's at now.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Breaking news: Uri Berliner has since resigned. I have to assume that "resigned" here is the usual thing where bigshots are allowed to resign to save face and avoid the public spectacle of being fired that any normal employee would face.


One thing I should add, which I didn't know earlier: some of this is being driven by this guy: Christopher Rufo. He was apparently important in proving that former Harvard president Claudine Gay plagiarized her PHD thesis and getting her fired/resigned, and recently has been posting a lot of Katherine Maher's most ridiculous tweets to make people realize what kind of person she is. He's been getting signal boosted by Elon Musk. This gave some of his tweets, as he put it, "10 million views, compared to NPR which gets 8 million listeners per week." So it's not like this stuff just randomly came up, there seems to be an organized conservative effort now to headhunt these woke progressive leaders.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 25, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I would argue it's just feminism. And I don't mean that in a bad way. Pregnancy sucks for women, it takes 9 months and does permanent damage to their body. It's only natural that as women gain more power in society, they make the rational choice to not have kids and do other things instead.


It jumps out at me that all the high fertility socities you list- Mongolia, the Amish, the Haredim- are, uh, not very feminist groups. I think people get distracted looking at the economy, because most socities get more feminist as they get wealthier.


I know some people will argue with this by saying "but what about Korea!" And I would argue that Korea is actually a very feminist society now, maybe not in the same way as the US, but in the sense that women have a huge amount of social power there. Notably, they elected a woman president, while still excluding women from the draft. The men are killing themselves at work just so they have a chance at getting married, but the women are under no obligation to produce a baby.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 8, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Because I'm out of the house more for work, as is typical for men, I could also just do another common thing men do and just...stop coming home after work. I'd be perfectly happy eating three dollar egg sandwiches from the local store, spending my time out drinking with friends, showing up back at ten or eleven at night and going to sleep before leaving in the morning.




I feel that.


I used to live in Japan, where what you describe is pretty much the stereotypical "salaryman" lifestyle. it's often held up to show how men are so miserable in modern society. But I always thought... it's not that bad. It gives them a lot of freedom and independence to do guy stuff, while also heavily focusing on their career. Guys don't necessarily want to come home at 5PM sharp so that we can cook an elaborate meal, clean the house, and have "family time" watching Disney movies on the couch for 4 hours. Once in a while, sure, but doing that every single day sounds like a nightmare to me.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


A quick aside: Oregon is a sea of under-populated red surrounding a couple of blue cities, mainly Portland. The Portland metro area has about half the population of the whole state, and therefore Portland mostly controls state-level politics. Where goes Portland, so goes Oregon.




This is basically every state in the US, except the exact balance differs. Every single city is blue, every single rural area is red. Only the population balance determines the "red-state/blue-state"


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think "nerds," as a specific subgroup, have lost their identity. For one thing, basically eveyone uses computers now, at least a little, so one of the core parts of being a nerd became gentrified. And all those other things you mention- band, cross country, anime, Magic, AP classes, chess, sci-fi, whatever, it's very popular with a huge swath of different people. At the same time, there's so much of that stuff that it's basically impossible for even the nerdiest to keep up with all of it.


Put it this way- I think that in the 80s there was a very real subculture of nerds, like the guy in "Ready Player One." They could all handle basic computer skills, watch Star Trek and Star Wars, quote Monty Python to each other, and play chess at an amateur level. They all had a shared reference of nerdy interests, which few normies were interested in back then. But now, that's changed in both directions- too much nerd interests to learn them all, and too many normies invading to keep the culture. Black nerds were an even more specific subtype, so they probably got pushed out even harder.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's not supposed to be actual good advice. It's supposed to make it look like she cares and is trying to help young men, but actually just helping her core audience of women feel smug and superior to those stupid males who tried to hit on them but were afraid of feminine hygiene products. You know, like those guys you see in TV sitcoms. Not so much in real life, but whatever.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


his reminded me of my own experience at a high school that hyper-optimized for college admission, where I quickly became jaded by classmates openly-performative "activism."




I went to the opposite: good, solid, public high school in the Midwest where everyone was clueless about how admission for the elite colleges worked. There were lots of us who were smart, hard-working, good grades, good test scores, etc. And we just got our asses kicked in admissions to the elite schools, because none of us had the right kind of extracurriculars or the right essays, and the teachers didn't know how to write recommendation letters for us. In retrospect I can see the mistakes I made, but how was I supposed to know that as a naive quakka-like 16-yr-old? I'm still a little bitter about that, and I do think it results in a society that rewards machiavellian sociopaths.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 13, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I had that thought too. I think a lot of us just don't have to think about these things very much, because we don't live a life where young attractive women are constantly throwing themselves at us. For most guys "sexual ethics" are pretty simple- you go to your wife/girlfriend/LTR and see if she's in the mood. I don't know what I would do if I was living the celebrity life. I imagine that must be one hell of an intoxicating experience, and this guy has been living it for decades.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm not surprised that Rogan, specifically, endorsed Trump. He has somewhat Trumpish views, especially on vaxines and covid. He had a nice, friendly chat with Trump, while Kamala refused to go on his show (at least in his preferred format). And he's a bro who likes combat sports, and Trump was an old wrestling fan (yeah not the same, but uh... adjacent?).


Still notable because so few celebrities have publicly endorsed Trump. Until now he had um... Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan? Basically just a handful of washed-ups who have given up on having an active career. celebrities are overwhelmingly democratic. Like, it's hard for Republicans to play any pop song at their rallies because the musicians all sue them. But maybe that monopoly is starting to break.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
What I'm seeing is that it started with (a) die-hard fans who would go see the latest "thing in franchise" no matter what and (b) progressives who would go see it to "own the chuds," and then give it critical acclaim and say that anyone who criticized it was just racist/sexist. But over time the right-wing chuds just stopped even bothering to complain, and the die-hard fans stopped watching. So there wasn't much for the progressive fans to do. It's not fun to watch a crappy movie and pretend you like it if you've got no righteous cause to fuel it.


Also kind of weird that Disney single-handedly controls so much IP. That should be a point of vulnerability. These days all the good stuff is coming from other countries.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't really hate the new Star Trek movies, they were stupid but at least kinda fun. it's the new TV shows I can't stand. Like you said, they went all in on the "strong female role models" angle and it became impossible to criticize them. But they were also this joyless slog through a grimdark universe of unrelenting misery. I do think some critics are finally waking up to that, or at least new critics are appearing who have noticed that the core audience is fed up.


I really do think it's becoming a more "normie" opinion that the Star Wars sequels were bad. If anything I hear more praise for the prequels now, people appreciate them for at least trying to be fun and being their own weird quirky thing.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I disagree. Japan was already exporting a lot of cultural influence in the 80s, arguably more than it is now. Every kid in America was obsessing over Ninja, Karate, ans samurai. Nintendo was an absolute craze. Nerds were trading unlicensed untranslated anime on vhs tapes, trying to figure out wtf it meant. Businessmen were showing off their money be eating at fancy sushi restaurants or benihana steakhouses, then getting drunk off sake and singing karaoke. There was even a hit song "im turning japanese."


On the more highbrow side, there were a lot of Japanese artists winning prestigious awards. yukio mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, kazuo ishiguro, andmany other less famous ones wrote great literature. Haruki murakami got a smash hit with Norwegian Wood. Film buffs loved Akira Kurasawa, whose samurai duels were a major influence on the light saber fights in star wars. Japanese jazz and classical musicians were also popular in their respective scenes.


If anything, that stuff should have been bigger. There just wasnt any real marketing in the US for anything foreign at that time. Even british stuff could be hard to find. There was no choice except American Hollywood movies and TV, for a regular person.


But now? Its easy to get international stuff from all over the world. People love it. But what does China have? A shitty, exploitive gambling app (Genshin impact)? One sci fi novel that i have no ideahow it became popular (three body problem)? Some incredibly jangoistic movies about killing americans (wolf warrior, The Battle at Lake Changjin) which went nowhere outside China? Some hacky web novels about "cultivation" and getting kidnapped by a billionaire?


The sad thing is that they used to do better. In the past, Chinese martial arts movies, food, buddhism, taoism, and sun tsu books were all popular. But almost all that stuff came out of Hong Kong. With the CCP takeover, and general crackdown on non-Beijing culture, their cultural output seems to have really stagnated. I think, if anything, people are hungry to see a Chinese pop culture product, but there's just nothing there.