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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   4378 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 04, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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This might be a topic better suited for the culture war roundup thread, but here goes:

The red tribe largely considers AR-15's a status symbol. In part this is because building/customizing AR-15's is a popular hobby for high IQ red tribers with a bit of disposable income, and no doubt this plays a role in the way both side talk about assault weapon bans.

So, what's the blue tribe equivalent of that phenomena? I'd say it's travel, except travel doesn't seem to be any kind of culture war flashpoint. I'd also say pet ownership, except that high IQ hobbies associated with pet ownership(dog training, for example) are probably associated with the red tribe more than the blue tribe. The closest thing I can think of is what I'd call fruity literature- novels or short stories with lots of superfluous gay stuff shoved in or outright centered around homosexual themes.

Funko pops and hot sauces

I'll join the crowd picking at whether AR-15s as a class are status symbols or even largely purchased as status symbols. Individual sellers can be expensive or extremely expensive, but for the most part they're a fairly standard and fairly accessible centerfire rifle. Of course, when you see someone with a high-end reflex site and no cleaning kit, then 'status symbol' is one of the more charitable options.

((And a lot of this stuff is at least partly about deniable and even self-deniable 'stores of value'.))

Blue Tribe... depends a bit on the subculture. Honestly, more than the political alignment. I think Blue Tribers are a lot more likely than Red Tribers to focus on custom plastic or cloth trinkets, where Red Tribers might be more likely to spend on custom woodworking and large metalworking art, but to the extent that's even true, it's only true statistically and it's easy to come up with fairly simple outside causes.

Blue Tribe has an anti-conspicious consumption bias, partly for Gaia-worshipping, and partly because flaunting wealth is very Trump and anything that can be remotely considered to be Trump is bad.

But surprise, surprise, that doesn't stop anyone from using wealth to flaunt status! You may notice a certain lifestylism by those who proclaim themselves liberal and socialist and egalitarian. Hobbies like travel, as you said, can cost an absolute fortune, while the person in question looks like a scruffy pleb. 'Minimalist' lifestyles that rely on the labor and effort of a half-dozen people, behind the scenes. Showing off the install of the solar panels on your house. Long hikes on the Appalachian trail (with equipment worth thousands of dollars.)

It turns out it is quite expensive to look authentically working-class. Blue Tribe elite try their darndest to not look like what they really are but like everything that exists, it is a commodity, sold at Whole Foods, the North Face, and your local gastropub.

I think the AR is a really good tribal identifier, I wouldn't say status symbol any more than any other gun is, because it's a moderately priced buy in and it can serve a number of other purposes (checks boxes for theoretical "home defense," many hunting purposes, target shooting, TEOTWAKI, etc). It's a platform you can get into for $500, and it's a platform you can spec out for $10,000, and we've decided to call them all ARs as a concept and talk about them as one category. The AR branding/memeplex is the key here, it could just as easily come out very differently if more gun enthusiasts identified themselves by gun make rather than by gun category.

International travel is definitely both a similar tribal signifier and a minor culture war flashpoint, though typically more in the positive than the negative sense. I recall hearing at different times some version of "X% of Americans don't even have passports, how can you be so sure about the world if you haven't even seen the world?!" from different Blue Tribe cultural outlets. Having traveled abroad is an important Blue Tribe cultural signifier, the same girls I can picture saying they'd never marry a man who owned an AR would probably also say they'd never marry a man who didn't have a passport, who didn't want to go abroad to learn and experience. Of course, the magic of confirmation bias is that most people go overseas just to tell you what they already thought was true at home because they heard it on Twitter is now true by lived experience.

Nothing else is quite like an AR, in terms of commitment level and universality. Bad haircuts, tattoos, piercings used to play a similar role, but are largely irrelevant now, style is largely uniform across tribal lines. Food items and stuff like name brand waterbottles are good tribal signifiers, but a little more transitory/cheaper/lower cost signaling.

Never heard of AR-15s being a status symbol. It’s just a tool to most people. I’m not sure people who customize their guns beyond optics are even red tribe. Seems more like a hobby for libertarians with disposable income.

The true red team status symbol is the Ford F150. Seems like every oil worker or other well-paid blue collar job blows their first paycheck on a down payment for a huge truck.

The hugeness of new trucks is likely driven by fuel standards, or lack of them based on wheelbase.

Many of us would prefer smaller light pickups that are no longer manufactured.

I would put both pickups and rifles as tribal signifiers, but in turn the items become status symbols from the bare bones to the customized to the collectible, delivering both superior function and conspicuous status signaling.

I'm not so sure about the premise that red tribe sees an ar15 as a status symbol, they're not really that expensive, one can be had for a couple hundred bucks which is within reach for basically any gainfully employed American so long as they can get past the legal hurdles. Blinging one out may be a kind of conspicuous consumption that is right coded and sends some kind of red tribe virtue signal. As a parallel to that I think you're looking in the right direction with pride type stuff. I'd say the ar15 of the blue tribe is probably something like drag queen story hour. Red tribe is vaguely against drag shows in general but is aware their critique of the general concept is not popular enough so they contain their push back to only against these less defensible(but still defendable) incarnations. And this push back induces even more demand for it from the opposing tribe.

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