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					joined 2022 September 11 05:05:23 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think that the idea that critical theory is an activist philosophy is self-contradictory and that those who practice critical theory to change the world in some way, or motivate action, are basically destined to have an incomplete, irreconcilable worldview.


(edit for clarity: Modern critical theory obviously is often activist, and believing that is not self-contradictory. But believing that critical theory at its core is activist, and should be practiced as a kind of means-to-an-end to affect social change, as many critical theorists believe, I think contradicts with the actual core of critical theory philosophy)


I started coming to this idea watching the Foucault/Chomsky debate, where Foucault is suspicious of Chomksy's Anarcho-syndicalism as a way to bring out a kind of ideal human nature, because he thinks the formulations we make about an ideal human nature, or society without political violence, are informed by the society we live in, which makes violence and non-ideality kind of unavoidable.


This argument is interesting in terms of the political spectrum because on one hand, it "out-criticals" the critical activist, but it also echoes the basic conservative reaction to leftist societal transformation projects.


There's no reason to me that a critical theory couldn't exist critical of social justice projects, BLM, modern Marxism, etc. The modern leftist capture of critical theory appears arbitrary.


But the Foucault debate led me to think, that conservatives, or just anti-progressives, could be a lot more bold in using their own critical theory against them in a way. I think it would be a field worth studying as a way to deconstruct leftist idealism and activism in a way that, like Chomsky, would leave them looking kind of pathetic in debate.


Doing that would kind of require doing the Nietzschian thing of acknowledging power, political violence, etc. and working with it in the debate, which I feel like is probably a step too far for most politicians. But I think specifically that rather than debate competing visions, there's room for a thinker to basically just deconstruct modern "critical theory" on its own terms, argue that it is self-contradictory and unlikely to do anything but breed new forms of political violence and power imbalance.


To tie it back to Nietzsche, it seems his works have an irony to them, even a self-aware irony, and that is what makes his calls for action "work" in some sense. It seems to me that a modern critical theory text that calls for action with no sense of irony is not thorough, and has a huge blind spot by basically not applying self-criticism.


I've been kind of working this idea out on my own, not sure if this is well trodden ground elsewhere, apologies for the half-baked quality.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm no scholar but the answer may be two authors/traditions. The Q source of Jesus' teachings along with the book of James representing the Jewish Jesus' traditional arguments, and the rest coming out of Paul's more radical anti-law, platonic tradition that survived into modern Christianity while the James school died out.


But I agree that from what I've read, Jesus as super moral innovator seems a bit overboard, I have to imagine he cribbed a good amount from John the Baptist and there was a kind of apocalyptic Jewish movement he was joining and learning from.


As an atheist I just feel like when the Christians try to make any kind of historical argument I find it unconvincing because they gloss over the details. Obviously there's no perfect person, Jesus had flaws, and the fact he is so worshipped today is as much an accident as history as how much Mohammed is worshipped. The issue with Christians is they really want Jesus to be the messiah. If they dropped that then they could actually understand something about themselves, and then I would feel comfortable worshipping with them.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't think they were in total conflict, I just think like I said they were different schools. I also think Acts was written by the Paul school so it's going to paper over what might have been more difficult disagreements to make it look like everyone important was okay with what Paul was doing.


Worshipping with no Jesus messiah would just be worshipping God, the sacredness of each human's existence, the mystery of consciousness, the light of love and morality in a vast dark universe, channeled through the best moral teachers we have including Jesus, yada yada. Yeah it's kind of just new-age humanism, and all the mechanisms keeping the church together would probably fall apart, but I do think if everyone could let go of the superstitions and utopian ideas while still keeping the machinery running there'd still be plenty worth worshipping in neo-Christianity.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think there a few seemingly fundamental mysteries of existence that make the universe a bit more than the dark void that atheists typically characterize it as, but I would bet against those mysteries pointing to some kind of 1 identity "god" type, I don't really know what the other options are, but it's a difficult question. But if I was in a worshipping group, and some people saw it in the "god" style, and I left things more open for myself, it wouldn't be a problem for me. It becomes a problem for me when it's worshipping a human being, or some subset of humanity, as God, because that seems very unlikely to me to be true.


I think there was a lot of intellectual Jewish and Greek thought at the time that an educated Jew like Paul was drawing from, in addition to certainly being inspired by Jesus. I think he clearly responded to Jesus' death differently than original apostles, not having been part of the original group and having visionary experiences afterwards, and I think intellectually he brought in platonic ideas to make sense of them and spread them through his followers. I don't think these ideas were incorporated in the Jewish Jesus groups and I think it was probably a point of tension.


And I just think his attitude in not following Jewish law went beyond Jesus' teachings and was his own innovation. Any of the original 12 could have taken Paul's role as the gentile baptizer, you could imagine half of them or more taking that role considering how many gentiles there are compared to Jews. But it's the outsider who does it and appears to mostly do it on his own. For me that strongly points to Paul having a lot of his own ideas and following them on his own accord, rather than being a outreach plan devised by the original Jewish movement.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You don't want to be on the progressive stack. Being on the stack means being treated like a child, it means that your wins can always be questioned, and it means the worst representatives of your "group" become the loudest and most influential.


You want to pick yourself up by your own bootstraps and fix whatever is making you miserable as long as you have consciousness and basic analytic abilities. I think this starts by learning what is actually abnormal. To some extent, "stimming" and "masking" are things everyone does. Everyone "learns" social cues, some just are naturally better at it. Everyone acts differently among different people and everyone has certain aspects of themselves that they hide from others. It's just a matter of degree for these things, even if the degree can be quite high and even though a lot of this stuff starts with outside factors that we don't control.


But I think the dislike "NTs" have towards autistic people is very similar to the dislike towards depressives, because I think (I suppose controversially) that people with both conditions can work on themselves to basically be normal, but both people of both groups often resent the idea that they can. For autistic people, I think they should just record themselves on their phone, and just try to analyze how they are talking and how others are talking in conversation. They should find NTs they trust and ask them to itemize everything they do differently than they are supposed to.


What will the result be? Probably shame. Being told how you are wrong or different naturally results in a lot of shame. And this is where I think a lot of the pushback comes from autists, from depressives, from minority groups, etc. But that is the point where you can say, I'm a grownup, I can deal with shame and move forward.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think the hidden logic for these types of claims look like this:


    

  1. Traditional values are unfair to women and morally wrong
    2. 

  2. Progressive values are fair to women and men and morally correct
    3. 

  3. Problems in the world are caused by moral failings relating to the "category" of the problem
    4. 

  4. Therefore the cause of a problem in the "category" of gender must be the result of the strength of immoral values regarding gender in the world.
    5. 

  5. Because traditional values are in recession and things are getting worse, there must be a secret conspiratorial strength to the traditionalist values, and this is the patriarchy.
    6. 



This is why patriarchy is hard to define. It can't just be the traditionalist trappings that have managed to remain, because it is something that needs to be in power right now manipulating society.


So I'd argue that rather agreeing with that the patriarchy exists, instead argue that it is a tool used to avoid the reality that traditionalist values can't possibly be the engine causing the problems of the western world today because it is just too weak.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for July 5, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I have not had a depressive episode in 2 months after dealing with high-functioning depression for about 10 years. Obviously that's not long enough to know I've really beat it, but I feel like I've had a real mental shift as a result of interrogating just about all of my beliefs in the past 3 years.


I'd like to document my thoughts in writing here in the wellness threads to organize them and spread the word of what I've learned, if others find it useful. These should be assumed to apply to healthy brains exhibiting unhealthy behaviors. Obviously the brain can have all sorts of conditions that are more deeply rooted or physically problematic that this won't apply for. These thoughts describe how a healthy person might become unhealthily unhappy through their upbringing, learned behaviors, and genetic predispositions, but nothing beyond that.


I'm going to start with just an outline that describes what I think are the essential qualities of depression. I hope to post more detail in a future wellness thread.


A depressive episode is a self-reinforcing dialogue involving shame and self-pity, where the self-pity is repeatedly justified to a skeptical observer.


Depression is less a state of being or description of action, but rather an analysis of actions over time. Rather than saying "I am depressed", it can be useful to say "I am pitying myself, and I am justifying why I have the right to pity myself, over and over again," because that better describes the actions in the moment.


If the pity must continually justified, the question is to whom? I think there is some inner skeptic that we are justifying it to, that remains unfooled, and I think that it's a really interesting avenue to explore why this is and what the results are.


There's also the question of why we pity ourselves. I think it's used as a coping mechanism for anxiety, and I think every depressive episode starts with an intense anxiety trigger. People who feel anxiety more intensely (neurotics) are more in need of coping mechanisms.


I think there are several large forces today promoting self-pity: progressive ideology, certain corners social media, the liberal internet more broadly, and aspects of the psychology establishment. A big part of my growth was understanding how my progressive worldview was deeply toxic to my self-esteem, and how I had fallen for a kind of internet-mediated social contagion. Along these lines, I see self-pity as a sister to ressentiment.


The quick answer on how to reduce depressive episodes is to (1) become less sensitive to anxiety and (2) when you pity yourself, and the skeptical observer asks you to justify it, admit that you can't, that the self-pity was foolish, and that you will manage your anxiety more productively instead. I will try to elaborate on strategies for this in future posts.


This requires understanding thinking-as-dialogue, which I think is how the brain synthesizes different points of view into a cohesive worldview. I think that most people probably do this without realizing it, and some may not want to admit it because it might sound like you are hearing voices or something. But I think that a healthy brain thinks in dialogue while smoothing it into a single "voice" that one identifies with. If you have issues with identity or have more serious mental issues with voices, etc. then that goes beyond what I'm describing.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Then wouldn't it be wise for Trump to take steps to avoid being investigated? It seems at every opportunity he acts guilty enough to get investigated but is actually clean enough to get out clean. I don't think it's out of the question to think he benefits from the image of the establish going after him, and he knows it.


In the end you get a bunch of people complaining about how he was treated, and that's what he wants. That's why he acts the way he does, anything to make him look like more of a victim.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's also a pretty absurd trope. I'd be surprised if anyone really believes that the successful men in the dating market are always or even mostly those who "respect women". It's an interesting inconsistency so many liberals have where they simultaneously see all of these issues in gender relations and yet so often the dating scene is "working as intended" when they want to use it as a cudgel.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I was going to make a similar comment about how VG writing is just bad, but I don't think it's just because they're nerds. It feels almost like the human race has become worse writers in the past few decades, it's like the torch was never properly passed on and it's become a lost art.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Regarding that Mark quote, there absolutely was a separation, the separation between Jews and Romans. To read the separation of church and state into that is anachronistic. Jesus didn't want the Jewish temple separate from the Jewish state. If you look at that quote practically, it is obvious in the context of the bible that taxation was a big deal at the time, and Jesus is weighing in on paying the Romans, which he almost certainly wasn't the only one to do so. If you look at it in the context of apocalypse, of which both Jesus and Paul believed was coming very soon, it adds another dimension that it doesn't really matter because God is coming to bring revelation soon anyway. And finally, if you look at the division between the Earthly world and the heavenly world in this statement, that is entirely an innovation by Paul (not Jesus who thought he would be king on Earth), and Paul was clearly influenced by Plato. So your classic example completely falls apart to support your argument that Christianity stands as an entirely new way of thinking apart from those before it.


I would love to hear from a Christian a compelling argument for why western civilization owes it such a great debt, but this is just not convincing.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think Galatians 2 emphasizes the kind of separateness Paul has with the Jewish sect, you have some calling Paul's authority or teachings into question, probably because of not following the law and the other ideas of Paul, so he goes to get the blessing of the James etc. (who he says added nothing to his message), and they decide to accept what he's doing, but then that's it and he goes back off on his own. I don't think the groups were enemies or cut off from each other, just that they were different groups with differences of belief and that there was probably some tension there.


Specifically I think Paul's peculiar beliefs were in the holy spirit which I think he invented, how rapture/apocalypse works and ideas around afterlife which I think draw from Greek philosophy and Platonism, and not needing to follow Jewish law.


I don't have a ready explanation for the unclean foods thing, but I tend to think that the more visions are involved the less I'm inclined to believe it. It's one thing if Paul has his visions and I think that probably happened, since he seemed very intently motivated by whatever he experienced. I don't think all the other apostles were also getting visions from god, nor do I think they were actually healing people in miraculous ways etc. after Jesus' death. This story is also very convenient for Paul if you have Peter have a vision that confirms that you don't need to follow the law if God says so. Compare that to James 2:8.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				On Hip-Hop (in the Culture War)
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think this essay fails as a defense of hip hop. You can't just go through a list of how cool this sample was or this lyric, or this genre fusion. I've listened to a lot of hip hop and explored the history, and there's a lot of complexity under the surface level "coolness" that is pretty compromising. There are plenty of intolerant or less informed ways to dismiss it, but the kind of over the top glorification you see here just doesn't move me.


There is talent in the genre, and it compares favorably in a lot of ways to the braindead pop today. But if you're talking about "black" music, it doesn't hold a candle to what black artists were doing in jazz, just nowhere close. And on the other hand I feel like the "blackness" of hip hop has been artificially maintained over time, whereas jazz was explicitly multi-cultural and that is one of its many better values as a genre.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for December 27, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Something I've never seen mentioned but am curious if it works for others is choosing to only walk to the grocery store. It seems to align a lot of things the right way, and seemed to help me lose weight. It's basically the only exercise I do and fitbit says I'm burning like 1500 calories a day (not sure how accurate that is). But you  do buy less groceries, and what you do buy you are carrying back all the way, and you also generally are making more trips since you can only carry so much.


Dedication-wise I think it's nice as well because you only have to stick to one choice, instead of a bunch of different will-testing choices.


Edit: Forgive me, I am a noob at calorie counting, so scanning through walking calories burned online, with weights etc. I think it should be around six hundred for my particular route.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
What's happening now and in the near future is the dark humor "Coen Brothers" version, where the AI isn't nearly as sentient or convincing as in Her, but people are falling in love with it anyway.


I see it more in the frame of decades than weeks, if I'm understanding your turn of phrase there. Siri is a good example of a lot of hype that didn't really go anywhere. In fact, I believe all of the Siri-likes got noticeably worse at some point after some zenith point after their launch. I personally used "Ok Google" for a while until I just didn't anymore. Is that a question of will, technology, or expense that we saw that degradation? It seems plausible that whatever challenge was there will continue to dog future versions, and then you add the layer of uncertainty with AI just randomly choosing tokens and I have some skepticism we're really that close to it working as a business model.


As for the specific tech portrayed in Her, you need to move past the "wide as an ocean, deep as a stream" effect of current chatbots, and I think that problem is severely, severely underrated in the AI discourse. That feeling you get with ChatGPT where it suddenly feels paper thin, where it starts feeling like a mode of Quora-summary? That never happens in Her, and you don't even feel like it could happen. And the question is how fundamental or persistent will that shortcoming be to the model of ChatGPT, and I find it very plausible that it remains that way for a long time.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 27, 2025
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I agree that this question should definitely be asked here. The dissident right doomerism (which mirrors the 2016 Sanders whining) reminds me of my black/white thinking depressive episodes. It's a kind of justification, not a logical argument. What the right wants to do, just like what Sanders wanted to do, is difficult. Being an outsider is difficult. It is a political miracle for Trump-aligned right-wingers that Trump is electable, when every historical precedent would suggest otherwise. There will probably never be anyone like him in our lifetimes. The fact that he closely lost an election to a former Democrat Vice President under a fairly popular administration should not cause people to spiral so hard. It's an emotional reaction to a very normal possibility that your preferred outsider candidate can lose.


I happen to strongly believe that the election was not stolen, but I imagine that the people here who do also want to live in a high-trust society. My question for those people is, what does it mean if you're wrong about the election? If you learned for a fact the election wasn't stolen, and you had been shouting otherwise, you'd be forced to consider how you contributed towards lowering societal trust by lowering its faith in our democratic process unnecessarily. It's been totally reckless for the right-wing to jump on this boat with so little meaningful evidence. For all I hear about high-trust societies here, that aspect of things, the fact that the right-wing very loudly questioned an election that was very likely totally fine, seems to me to have massively increased distrust. And again, if they're wrong, then what was it all for?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The hardest part about Christianity is that all of the evidence points to a Pharisee who never met Jesus exploiting his death and fashionable Jewish apocalypticism onto disaffected Romans which he felt compelled to do after hallucinating that he saw the heavenly Jesus alone in a cave somewhere. Do I believe his hallucination was a secret revelation given to him by the heavenly body of Jesus himself? No.


If a miracle happens somewhere, you've piqued my interest and I'd be curious to follow up on it. If it turns out the miracle was a rumor spread by a guy who saw it in a hallucinatory vision, I move on pretty quickly.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				USA Election Day 2022 Megathread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Just regarding your win/lose takeaway: I think you could argue fundamentals were always "midterms with a unpopular president." What happened during the campaign never made Dem victory a wholly expected outcome that they could then lose. Against the core fundamentals, Dems were always underdogs, and it seems hard to me to see this as a Dem loss.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 23, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
No I consider Q Jesus' teachings, but it was placed into the bible from the Pauline school, and I don't think the way the holy spirit is referenced in Q has the kind of theological qualities that it does in the more explicitly Paul writings, it's more just used as a kind of addendum or exclamation mark, there's not much meaning in how it's used there and could be removed without changing the meaning of things.


Corinthians 15:35 (and a bit preceding it) goes over what I think are his unique ideas that I don't think the Jewish followers of Jesus really had in mind, and have that platonic quality. When he's talking about "glories" of things that is basically Platonic "ideal" versions of things.


I think that contrasts with James' "whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away." I'm not totally familiar with all the evidence on what Jewish Jesus followers believed, I think there would be knowledge of Greek ideas and the traditional Jewish views of it not being much, but I don't see anything like passage of Paul in the above passage along with his certainty. I only find one passage in Q that seems anything like an afterlife heaven and that may have been phrased differently in Jesus' original words, referring to what I think most scholars understand that he believed in an earthly heaven that he would rule.


And sorry I meant James 2:10 which I think Paul very much disagrees with.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Matt Yglesias Considered As The Nietzschean Superman
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I haven't really seen what you describe in the last paragraph. Where I've seen Nietzsche discussed, master morality is usually seen with some sympathy. Personally, I feel like aspects of slave morality as Nietzsche describes it were acting as deep unconscious forces in my psychology that I am very glad to have made conscious to more easily push back against where they are unproductive, and I feel like conversations like these help with that. To manage emotions it helps to be able to identify them, and reading your post I actually felt the ressentiment reading about the jocks, I noticed it, and I let it go. That is not something I used to be able to do so easily.


I think the issue with the jocks and nerds view is by definition you are dealing with youth coming into the world with whatever background they happened to have, and little of their own choices has had an effect on where they are. The question is what happens for the rest of the adult lives of the slave morality kids? Are they doomed, or can they change their outlook? Can someone think themselves into being a master moralist or onto some kind of middle road? I tend to think we have some kind of agency and can alter the course of our lives in some way. Elon Musk takes ketamine for depression, he probably grew up immersed in slave morality and forged some kind of master morality for himself, but still has parts from his childhood that hate himself. That's the kind of complexity that is happening for most people who aren't totally immersed on one side or the other.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 26, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Interestingly, I feel like game studios have not been as catastrophically bad about this as hollywood. Generally the "audience shifting" controversies are pretty mild and course corrected quickly compared to Star Wars, Ghostbusters etc. It's funny because it seems like this whole thing got started with GamerGate but overall the big studios never totally lost their head, and I think nothing nearly as devastating as new Star Wars has happened to any IP. EA is the one company that I think has made the most missteps, but they were voted the worst company in the world so what do you expect.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The moment he stops being investigated he also loses his political power. He's powerful because his actions feed the collective persecution complex of him and his supporters. It's not just political. He also always creates the appearance he is doing something shady behind the scenes, to bait investigations because they are good for him and his political prospects.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Yeah learning about the pace at which TNG episodes were written and shot was a revelation to me, and it made me question why so much is invested in a show that was, as good as it was, clearly hobbled by not having time to really flesh out ideas and rework bad scripts, and was basically rushing all the way to its end.


Similarly, years ago I was listening to a Phil Ochs song about how terrible "liberals" are and it just hit me, why am I getting my political opinions from music? From rock to rap, why are the pop stars determining what I think over political scientists, essayists etc.


It's feels like even the most deep cuts of pop culture feel shallow as a puddle, it's like it's all expressionism, just surface level reactions to things, no humility, no ability to dig deeper, due to time constraints or just ignorance of the authors. And it almost feels like a psyop where we're told to just stay in the there, don't try to look up the past, it's all problematic and boring. Like they read Great Expectations and Shakespeare in High School just to intimidate and bore you so you stay away from that stuff for good.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Why is your criteria that men must explicitly state this preference? There's been infinite debates on "mansplaining" but I believe there is a kernel of truth to it and it's revealed through behavior. I think the gendered aspect is overrated though and what you're really dealing with are blowhards that are socialized around other blowhard men, and I find them unpleasant as a man to a similar degree and would hate being married to one. Importantly though, these types have no self-awareness and are unable to articulate their true preferences.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
That doesn't account for things getting worse. If gender issues are getting worse while traditional values are receding then there must be some other variable.