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Notes -
The Pitt as a lagging culture war indicator
So I’ve been watching The Pitt with my wife lately.
The premise of the show is to follow doctors and nurses in an ER over a single 15-hour shift, much like the old show 24.
The show has been praised for its accuracy and I certainly find it intense at times.
That being said, I’m halfway through the Emmy-nominated season and while the medical drama part is solid, I’ve been repeatedly struck by the culture war aspects of the show.
According to Wikipedia, development began late 2023 after the writers strike and into 2024. The show premiered in early 2025 and has already been renewed.
It’s good and I’ve enjoyed watching it.
That being said….
There’s a bit of a culture war time capsule effect that shows up from time to time. It’s intermittent but fairly heavy-handed I think:
It’s hard to convey from the descriptions but there are two themes I want to comment on.
The first is what is treated as something to joke about vs a Very Special Message. We get jokes about drug addicts with nicknames, jokes about frat boys in car wrecks, jokes about whether a medical student killed someone or just got unlucky. No joking around though when it comes to using terms like “unhoused.”
The other major theme that to me comes out strongly is a vibe of knowing the answers to all these political issues. There’s never any exploration or even acknowledgment of a controversy beyond as an obstacle to be dealt with.
For instance (mild spoilers) the girl coming in for an abortion evidently missed the 11 week deadline. No problem! Doctors will just lie. The mother of the patient isn’t on board but that’s ok the doctors will browbeat her into it and suggest the daughter will never speak to her again if it happens.
Sometimes even the doctors don’t know what to do like in the case of an incel with some violent journaling or a patient who’s been poisoned by his wife—she claims without evidence or corroboration that he’s molesting their daughter and we’re horrified to learn that she might be the one in trouble!
Overall though, the attitude is one of “we know the answers but sometimes society isn’t quite caught up yet.”
Will be curious to see how the tone of shows like this changes having now entered an era of “reckoning” and “post-mortems” of democratic hubris.
I'm pretty sure there's a fascinating generational divide at play in things like this.
Here's my folk theory on that. Because of the particular circumstances Boomers were born into, many of the more artistic ones were raised in a much more conservative environment, then had a massive crisis of faith / trust / belief in the late 60s through the 70s, and then had to figure out a way to reintegrate themselves into society and make art about it. And because of that, whatever their other flaws, they were often VERY good at making entertainment that could talk to actual moderates and conservatives, because in many cases, they were the black sheep who had charted an overt path away from where they had started. They were the prodigal sons, but when they returned, they intended to remake culture with what they had found.
If you were a conservative, trying to maintain a traditional culture, these people were like the pied piper of Hamelin. They were really good at targeting younger members of your home communities, seductively you might say. They were legitimately good at representing things you recognized while also undermining it with a certain kind of criticism or nuance, at their best. Or even when they were provoking, they were good at signaling that they were provoking from within a shared tribe, so to speak.
Gen X didn't have the formative experience of the draft, and they grew up in the shadow of both this artistic explosion as well as the backlash, the stagflation of the 70s, and the rise of the religious right, and the cold war of the 80s. They saw the huge excesses of the divorce revolution and the drug culture and AIDS as-it-was-experienced and various miserable, alienating radical activist movements. They were, perhaps, particularly attuned towards cynicism about politics and messy ambiguity in art as a result. The best Gen X (at least when they were young) was often provocative, knowing exactly how to needle a conservative majority, but rarely preachy... (although if I go back and listen to, say, Eddie Vedder now, I can recognize the west coast SJW inclinations there the whole time). And also, the left of center counter culture got stomped down so incredibly hard in the 80s that they legitimately recognized themselves as outsiders, a kind of marginalized dissent. And Gen X got irony.
I think (when it comes to art and communication), everything kind of went to hell with the combination of the collapse of conservatism in the George W Bush years, the rhetorical success of, especially, Jon Stewart, and the messianic rise of Obama. Because it ushered in a kind of generational change, and that meant that a lot of the Millennials, especially, developed their early political identities during the Bush years and then experienced a conversion experience with Obama, all while internalizing the worst elements of Jon Stewart's frequent stance of "we, the smart ones, don't even need to refute the arguments of these moral monsters and intellectual imbeciles, and so we will use a condescending sneer at them instead". And I mean, I liked that tone during the Bush years too - it was very fun and self-satisfying. But it mixes with thoughtful art really, really poorly, it doesn't do nuance or ambiguity, and it really only works when you're preaching to the choir. And once Obama swept it, it turned out that being against something legitimately lousy was easy mode, and when you're for things (like high speed rail in California, or a really aggressive trans agenda), and you leave a giant trail of wreckage in your wake, sneering at your opponents simply isn't enough. That doesn't persuade. It doesn't take reality seriously, or your own failures. Everything that made those messy dissident Boomers so effective had dried up. And I really do think radically different life experiences played a major role here. I think there's an ugly tendency in modern progressive culture broadly for people to want to feel as though they are both, at once, the eternal put upon victims and dissidents of power, while also the natural experts, the aristocratic power that stands in perpetual judgement due to intellectual merit and thus moral merit. And... that just really sucks for sophisticated art. And then the radicalization that happened in the lead up to Trump has just made everything vastly worse, of course. I've noted it before, but the run up to the 2016 election was the first time in my life that I had EVER seen artistically cooler, non-cringe media from Republicans than Democrats. It felt, at the time, like that was an important bellwether of something.
I've seen Freddie de Boer bemoan what he calls the "We are already decided" stance (or something like that). I think if you're in communities that have already adopted that stance, it becomes very difficult to make sophisticate, nuanced art that can reach out to people with other life experiences.
I remember early on in cancel culture Chris Rock (I think) talking about how he couldn't play colleges anymore. And he had some statement that was like, "You can't be wrong anymore on your way to being" - suggesting, I think, that even if you were going to tell a joke that ended up with an approved morality, you weren't allowed to even play around rhetorically with the unapproved morality, or give it is due, or take it serious, as a rhetorical technique before ending up where you were supposed to. I think I'm paraphrasing that roughly right. And I think (if I am) that that captured some of the specific tension I find so interesting here.
What's the moral of the tale, to you? (This is a 20 year mystery for me.)
Be sure to pay the piper if you want to call the tune.
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When you make deals with the Devil, do not try to welch on the deal, it never ends well.
Clearly the Piper is not an ordinary human being, and when you think about it, neither is the plague of rats. If you have a mysterious plague then hot on its heels a mysterious figure turns up offering to fix it for you, pay the goddamn gold and be glad that's all you had to hand over. The city officials were both greedy and stupid, and the entire town had to pay the price as a result.
Maybe also "government officials have always been on the take" as well.
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Pay your pest control contractors or they'll murder your children.
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To be honest, I don't recall the details of the actual tale. I was just using the phrase in its usual metaphorical sense - I just double checked Wikipedia, about this, and it suggested that "The phrase "pied piper" has become a metaphor for a person who attracts a following through charisma or false promises.".
Skimming the Wikipedia page for this makes the tale, and its history, sound pretty interesting in its own right, but I don't have much to add to that.
I suppose, as normally used, it's "short term gains mean long term losses". Being enticed away by something that sounds good, to the point you ignore all other intervention, then you end up losing everything.
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Yea, covid and Trust the Science came from people both critical of capitalism and institutional racism but trusting of the combination's experts. One comes to the conclusion that socialism or capitalism, white supremacy and its overcoming, Pfizer would do things the same way. A scientist is a scientist, in Oklahoma or Cuba.
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I think this is broadly true, but I think there’s another serious problem which is that starting with Gen X, there’s been a steady decline in literacy in the sense of having read and absorbed enough written fiction to understand how to use things like symbolism and metaphor and subtext to tell good stories. It’s actually weird, but for artists, they are not subtle at all. One conversation on Reddit sort of crystallizes this. There’s a very famous episode of old series Star Trek in which Kirk lands on a planet full of literal Nazis. As in full on swastika wearing, goose stepping Nazis. Turns out that this Nazi planet was turned Nazi, deliberately by a rogue Starfleet officer. Now, lots of people on Reddit, college educated, supposedly literate had a huge problem with the episode. They could not grasp that you could have the bad guy defend a bad idea unless you secretly hold the views that the villain is espousing. And of course if you can’t imagine other people telling stories without having to explain that X is bad so that you understand that they don’t agree with it, telling a story where you don’t hit people over the head with your own views lest you be accused of heresy becomes impossible. First because you don’t want to be mistaken as a heretic, as you kinda need to be able to work in mainstream media, but second because you have no idea how to use subtext or metaphor or symbolism to get a point across. It’s a skill issue.
I am confused what the complaint about the episode was and what subtext was occurring. It does not seem to me that the episode was any more subtle than that "The Nazis are bad guys, and the bad guys are Nazis".
I imagine it was "the bad guy didn't think he was a bad guy, he introduced the Nazi ideology to help this planet's culture unify and it was then taken over and brought to an extreme by power-grabbing native politicians" so that of course makes it Evil and it should be censored. Because trying to say that anything at all about Nazism was even slightly good (e.g. using what Hitler did to unify post-First World War Germany to try and unify a culture falling apart) means that you are saying "all Nazism is good" and we know that is not true.
I honestly don't know what the hell has been going on with education since I was scratching cuneiform on clay tablets back in my time at school. Just recently I saw someone on Tumblr showing why censorship of old books is wrong by saying she never even knew Long John Silver had a black wife until she grew up and read an old, uncensored version of "Treasure Island" (and even then in the comments people were going on about "but it is Racism to use the term 'negress' so censorship is good!").
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The controversy on Reddit was that the writers on that particular episode must be Nazis because the villian of the story was particularly in Starfleet and had dialogue that suggested he believed that Nazis were on to something. So obviously the only reason that you could possibly make a character say something positive about Nazis is that they were obviously Nazis. Which, to me seems like a bizarre way to approach literature where the artist is incapable of imagining a belief he doesn’t actually hold. It’s like saying imagination doesn’t exist. But given that understanding of literature I can easily see why the message tends to be smack people on the head obvious simply because they cannot be anything else.
Yes, the guy who founded the Nazi planet in that episode explicitly believed that Nazi Germany was an extremely well-organised society. He says that it was the "most efficient state Earth ever knew". He thought that he could save this society by giving it a social model that had all the benefits of Nazi organisation and cohension while stripping out the evil goals.
This is not, I believe, a historiography that any competent modern historian would agree with. The Third Reich was quite inefficient in many ways, and frequently made poor decisions. Where the message of 'Patterns of Force' is something like "you can't separate the good from the bad, and the advantages of Nazism cannot outweigh its disadvantages", I think the message you'd get from a modern historian would be that Nazism is just bad overall.
I would normally say that it's possible John Gill is just meant to be wrong, IC, and his belief about the efficiencies of Nazism are wrong, but the episode does seem to take his side. The problem with Ekos is not that Nazism is ineffective; it's that Nazism is evil. Gill's failure was thinking he could remove the evil, not in thinking that Nazism is effective. Spock himself agrees with Gill's first judgement:
And it delivers the moral pretty blatantly at the end:
Yeah, I think the moral (as this was the 60s so the Second World War was much closer in time) was a warning about "it couldn't happen here" - yes it could, and even well-intentioned people can be seduced by something that offers what seems to be the public good. The entire German nation wasn't composed of horrible monsters, they were mostly people Just Like You, and they fell for this for different reasons, mostly because they were promised solutions to the mess that was happening right then. And Hitler delivered, for a time, on those promises.
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Can modern historians be trusted? The very topic of this thread is that De naziis nil nisi malum in left-leaning circles, of which academia is certainly one. I read Richard Evans' series on the Third Reich and recall reading a lot of stupid policies from the Nazis. Nonetheless, I can't get past — and I can't see how detractors get past — that in twelve years Nazi Germany saw rapid economic growth, and then lost a war against four great powers with only the help of two minor powers. They gave a pretty good fight. Of course, you can say that the insanity of Nazism lead to them starting an unwinnable war, but they must have been doing some good things to even acquit themselves as well as they did.
I’m not sure and I’m not sure how much of an honest answer to the question simply because no academic is free to say anything nice about the nation and era that’s seen as demonic. It would be like asking a 16th century academic in Catholic ruled parts of Europe to describe John Calvin’s Geneva. Saying anything good about it, no matter how true or even obvious is, is going to get you n so much trouble that no one would dare.
The classic example of people saying nice things about Nazi Germany is the autobahn, right? I think historians still feel free to compliment that.
I suppose I think the consensus around Nazi Germany has moved in the direction that they did make some right calls and pick some low-hanging fruit, but also that a lot of their strengths were either inherited (e.g. the military system) or illusory and exaggerated (e.g. taking credit for the German economic revival). Nazism as a system wasn't uniquely brilliant.
The way TOS frames it is as something like a deal with the devil. You get efficiency, power, a rapid rise to power, social solidarity, etc., and all you have to do is be evil. That's not what was going on with Hitler's Germany.
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Nazi Germany mostly inherited the imperial German military system, essentially intact but unused. Reviving it was politically popular and the sort of thing that was inevitable from whoever rose to the top in the Weimar republic. Hitler's main military reforms were either net negatives like the SS or copies of the adaptations other major powers made to the lessons of WWI, coupled with the existing highly-competent Prussian officer corps's adaptations to the lessons of the Spanish civil war.
It's true that Hitler did some common-sense reforms that he can fairly get credit for, but these reforms were, well, commonsense- few of them were unique to Germany.
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I used to wonder why books sometimes had a little disclaimer on the copyright page about "the views expressed are not necessarily those of the author" because duh, of course someone can write about a thing without thinking it is a good thing (e.g. crime writers writing about serial killers).
And then this sort of literalism and inability to separate out viewpoints expressed by characters from what the author thinks came along. If it is not 21st century liberal to progressive all the way through, then clearly you are saying bad things, and clearly you only say bad things because you believe bad things, and clearly that means you are a bad person.
Though I can't blame "kids these days" for that, even if it is the most egregious examples; it happened back in the day as well. Arthur Conan Doyle had to make it clear to a review that yes, thank you very much, he was aware that he was working in the same field as Poe and Gaboriau of detective fiction, and that just because in early Sherlock Holmes stories, Holmes had a poor opinion of Dupin, it did not mean that Doyle himself had a poor view:
To An Undiscerning Critic by Arthur Conan Doyle, in London Opinion (28 December 1912)
Sure there are times when one cries with acidity,
'Where are the limits of human stupidity?'
Here is a critic who says as a platitude
That I am guilty because 'in gratitude
Sherlock, the sleuth-hound, with motives ulterior,
Sneers at Poe's Dupin as "very inferior".'
Have you not learned, my esteemed communicator,
That the created is not the creator?
As the creator I've praised to satiety
Poe's Monsieur Dupin, his skill and variety,
And have admitted that in my detective work
I owe to my model a deal of selective work.
But is it not on the verge of inanity
To put down to me my creation's crude vanity?
He, the created, would scoff and would sneer,
Where I, the creator, would bow and revere.
So please grip this fact with your cerebral tentacle:
The doll and its maker are never identical.
There's also the opposite situation where the author launders his beliefs through his characters. If the characters never have any flaws in their beliefs shown by the story progress (or if the only flaw is "he's too extreme, but it isn't otherwise a bad idea"), there's a good chance the author does believe them. If the author mentions fine details that would refer to some real life incident that is not actually supposed to be in the story, there's a good chance the author is trying to lecture about the real life incident. If the character makes a 3 hour speech and the story quotes 2 hours of it, the character's probably an author mouthpiece.
Don't overcorrect on this.
But I was assured that "the knife-ears took er jerbs!" scene was not at all meant to be a comment on Trump and immigration! 😁
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I have always enjoyed the critique of Red Dead Redemption 2 along the lines of 'bunch of outlaws and brigands happen to hold perfectly progressive 21st century views on gender, race, consent etcetera'
My favorite was the show Vikings when one of the lead female characters stops a fellow viking raider (and the fact thst there was a woman on the raid already tells you a lot) from raping a woman in the town they're murdering and pillaging in.
IIRC that scene was in the (admittedly heavily embellished)source material- the Vikings(or their Christianized great-grandchildren, whatever) themselves were the ones who lied about it.
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I wonder if this is a universal human narrative: "Our enemies are simultaneously too strong and too weak" is frequently described as a common trademark of fascism, but honestly I see everyone in politics playing it these days, like your observation here.
Oh, it's absolutely ubiquitous. Some describe it as a common trademark of fascism... but I think you might actually see it more frequently from the critics of fascism. It's been the narrative on the alt-right since that term went mainstream: they're both incredibly dangerous and total losers. Hell, it's the narrative on the literal Nazis, as can be observed just a little upthread. They were not merely evil but utterly incompetent in all respects. Safe to say, I think, those same people don't believe the allies overcommitted to fighting the Nazis and really didn't have to try that hard.
But... it's not actually a contradiction? One of the more common arguments you see along this line is anti-anti-immigration: 'Nativists believe both that immigrants are lazy welfare parasites and that they steal jobs from hardworking Americans!' But groups have multiple members: there could be some of each. And often the 'strength' and 'weakness' can co-exist. Are guerilla fighters strong or weak? They can't beat their occupiers face-to-face or they wouldn't be guerillas. But guerilla campaigns have driven occupiers out many times. How about terrorists or incarcerated criminals? How about a world-champion MMA fighter... sent to the front lines in Ukraine? How about Harvey Weinstein? How about an IRS auditor? In some contexts these people are very dangerous and in others they're very weak.
I think you see it everywhere because it's often true; it's the complaint that misses the mark by equivocating over definitional boundaries until it looks like there's a contradiction that doesn't really exist.
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It's also an old pre-battle rallying speech technique. "Yes, they're strong, and it's okay to be afraid, but if you do your part and hang in there, we'll beat them because we're stronger".
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I think this is just healthy psychological sentiment for any human trying to competitively get things done vs. another human. Mike Tyson has a good quote about this:
What is that but “my enemy is simultaneously too strong and too weak?” And lots of competitive athletes have very similar points of view about their psychology during training and competition. It energizes them and keeps them hungry and competitive.
So I think you’re right, it’s a common narrative and, one step further, it’s a good and healthy narrative.
Side note:
Mike Tyson is the greatest SPORTS champion who ever lived ... probably. But we will never know for sure.
After Cus D'Amato died and the Don King organization brain fucked a literal homeless kid from New York, it derailed Tyson's career with no possibility for a comeback in boxing (although his podcast / movie / pot farm career seems to have been, and remained, quite lucrative).
He was a physical freak who also had an insane natural, prodigal understanding of boxing itself. If you watch the 80s videos when he's still pretty much a teenager, his movement is not only fast but anticipatory in ways that usually only come with experience. He sets up sequences before launching them - which is made all the more unstoppable by the fact that his punching power is generally beyond measure.
I've been contemplating the idea of writing a long effortpost on "Did Money Actually Ruin Sports?" and Tyson and boxing would be at the center of it rather than the usual suspects of the Big Four (Football, Basketball, Baseball, Hockey). The primary reason for that is that, with a longer lived Cus D'Amato and the blocking out of Don King et al., I think Tyson would be the absolute consensus pick for "Greatest American Athlete" of all time.
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You’re right, it’s a common narrative because it is adaptive—but as a cursory look at the natural world will tell you, “adaptive” does not necessarily mean good, true, or righteous.
Righteous is irrelevant, though?
True is also irrelevant because your enemy is always a mystery. Lacking 100% knowledge of your enemy (because how could you ever have it?), it is impossible to know the truth of your enemy. So it’s best to plan with humility and act with confidence.
And I say good in the context of healthy, as in, likely to lead to a better and more predictively successful life
So, adaptive wins, as it always does.
Edit: Probably worth saying that I think this is also a good and righteous state of mind. When God told the Israelites he was giving them Canaan, they didn’t just waltz in and wait for God to vaporize their enemies. They sent in spies, scoped out the land, enjoyed a few odds-evening miracles, engaged in effective battle strategies, suffered and died to defeat (partially) enemies that were simultaneously too strong (to be defeated solely by the Israelites) and too weak (to resist God’s will).
> it’s a common narrative and, one step further, it’s a good and healthy narrative.As for truth, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a fascinating concept, but people can and do come to definitive conclusions about the world all the time. Are the #resist libs correct in assuming themselves the underdogs?
But this is different from truth. A definitive conclusion is just a definitive conclusion. People conclude wrongly all the time. The truth will be discovered in the contest.
We’ll find out, won’t we? But at every moment, it is best for me, Joe Chud Reactionary, to treat them as both strong (they control many commanding heights of information warfare and have copious quantities of the sinews of war, among other advantages), and weak (I must believe that they can in fact be defeated, implying that my side is stronger than them due to some combination of factors.)
They would benefit from doing the same thing, so I hope they don’t.
I got sniped by your edit, RIP. To respond, you seem to think of the “weak but strong” mindset as recognizing the enemy’s strength but thinking oneself still capable of taking them on. This is, indeed, a healthy mindset to have towards one’s adversaries. As I tend to see it in practice though, it’s a cognitive trap that does improve morale, but usually does so at the cost of epistemic clarity(e.g. “Republikkkans are literal fascists, we can surely defeat them with protests and slogans!)
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The damage done by that Umberto Eco essay is up there with the xkcd "showing you the door" comic.
But not quite up there with that misunderstood Karl Popper quote!
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