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Ready for some mild 36 year old culture war material? In 1988, BBC released their adaptation of C.S. Lewis' "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe". I watched this adaptation with my children this weekend, and having recently reread the Chronicles of Narnia series, I was surprised how little the script deviated from the book. Indeed, the essentially verbatim reproduction puts a spotlight on the few deviations.
In the book, the children meet Father Christmas who gives presents to ready them for the coming fight.
The BBC adaptation follows the book word for word until the last sentence (as best as I can remember: I couldn't find the script online):
The original reading was a powerful statement, even in the time that Lewis wrote the book, and fully in keeping with his complementarian perspective. In the BBC adaptation, the interaction with Father Christmas ends unsatisfactorily, without any larger point than to provide the children with tools. The scene is robbed of the emotion and power of the original text.
Of course, the Disney adaptation is even worse, making is seem like Father Christmas is giving Susan permission to fight, and possibly intentionally subverting the original text:
Neither the BBC or the Disney is "rewriting history"; every adaptation has to make compromises to fit the medium. However I would desire that any adaptation treat the source with respect and not neuter or subvert it. In many ways, C.S. Lewis was and remains a counter-cultural force. Watering down his work to be palatable to modern audiences is a direct contradiction to his intentionally medieval outlook.
Was C.S. Lewis truly counter-cultural at the time? I think it’s only because the counter-culture and the mainstream flipped in recent years that C.S. Lewis’ views would be considered anything transgressive. His attitude towards women was fairly standard for a mid-20th century British man and his Christianity would have been shared by the majority in society.
C. S. Lewis quite explicitly believed that his Christianity was not shared by the majority in his society. He is very clear that he believes that Christians are a minority in Britain, even though it was the middle of the 20th century and the number of people writing 'Christian' on the census was an overwhelming majority.
See, for instance. Mere Christianity p. 62, where he writes, "My own view is that the Churches should frankly realise that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives." That book was published in 1952, and the passage I quoted was based on a radio talk he gave in the early 1940s. Lewis believed that as of 1952 most British people were not Christian.
For Lewis, being Christian in a meaningful sense is very much not just a matter of identification, nor of lip service. He understood himself to be counter-cultural.
Hear, hear.
There’s a statement which I’ve heard semi-frequently in church and on Christian radio, and I know not its provenance: “God has no grandchildren.” It means that people may be culturally similar to their Christian parents and ancestors, but faith in Jesus as savior and God as father is an individual matter, not a familial/cultural one. For example, my father’s stories of his conversion have been vitally important to my own faith, but my faith has a different genesis (pun intended) and is inextricably mine.
Institutional churches, like the Church of England, tend to lose sight of this fact and settle for children inheriting the faith of their fathers, putting it on a shelf for safekeeping like the family china and bringing it out on holidays.
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Seems like Lewis was in retrospect correct.
Yes, quite probably. He was certainly a critic of merely cultural Christianity.
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I bumped into an earlier example when reading G. K. Chesterton's autobiography. Born in 1874, he writes that he was taught Christianity at a mainstream school by teachers who were not themselves Christians. This took me by surprise. We are talking about around 1890, and there is a Cathedral near where I live, built 1879, spires added 1913-1917. There is a contradiction between Chesterton's account of his post-Christian upbringing at a time when people are still building Cathedrals.
Chesterton doubles down, proposing that enthusiasm for Empire was a substitute for loss of Christian faith. People need to believe in something, and if Christianity has faded, they will latch on to something else.
My guess at the social history involves Darwin and the debates following his 1859 publication of The Origin Of Species. The London intellectuals of the generation before Chesterton respond by quietly giving up on Christianity. Meanwhile, others are participating in various Victorian Religious Revivals. Christianity looks healthy, but society's thought leaders have abandoned it. Christianity rots from the top down, and elites, such as C. S. Lewis experience a post-Christian country, while others are still happily attending Church.
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Lewis and his society were simply closer to the reality of war.
Even to this day, this attitude is held when the rubber meets the road. Ukraine didn't put both men and women on the frontline and Ukraine did not stop women from leaving on the grounds that they had to fight and there was very little outrage about it.
People just don't want to be told they can't do X, even if they had no intention of actually doing that thing.
Uh, doesn't Ukraine put women in combat?
What percent of Ukrainian front line troops are women?
Good luck finding a real answer to that question. BBC claims 5,000 but that's almost certainly an egregious lie. My guess is that the real answer rounds to zero.
I'm willing to change my estimate if you can find a single story of a woman killed while storming enemy lines.
The UKR army is like 800k strong which translates to roughly 225k troops on the front.
Given ukraines manpower problems having 2% of your frontliners be women might be reasonable. After all while a 23 year old man is probably better than almost any 23 year old women a 23 year old women might outperform a 45 year old man.
2% is fairly low. Frontline troops can mean Artillery gunners, FPV drone user ect, there are so many different combat roles in the military that they can find the least bad role for women to save more men for the infantrymen.
I take it you don't play co-ed sports. It might be worth an effort post, but there are lots of reasons why men are better than woman at combat that even this age gap wouldn't come close to erasing.
I suspect that this is where the 5,000 number comes from. But if women are being used on the "frontline" to save men for the actual frontline then "frontline" is a pretty meaningless term.
I play co-ed hobbyist sports but nothing professional. A women who lifts takes creatine and can do Frontflips can be more athletic than 20% of men aged >40. Obviously this doesn't describe many women but this maybe describes the top 1% of women which corrisponds to roughly 100% of women on the real front lines.
There's a big issue that's hard to mention which is that "frontline" can mean "any combat role where getting shot at is a real concern" (which is why I suspect it's 2% of the UKR army) and "guy in the trenches". What of these roles that I could find on /r/combatfootage would you describe as "the front lines"
I suspect the 5k would call all 5 "front line". I would probably exclude 4.
I would define frontline in a similar way to you. Frontline = high risk of death + proximity to enemy forces. Whether a particular role is front line would depend on how many people died doing it, but many of those roles could definitely be considered front line.
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I saw propaganda around that recently, I didn't really take it that seriously - just thought it was part of the same desperation causing them to look for men. Because, if you're going to use women as combat troops, it seems deeply unwise to let half your manpower go.
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Frontline duty is 100% voluntary for women, while men are both drafted and assigned to the frontlines.
Even if you had complete equality in the draft, sending women to the frontline would be poor practice for the same reason that sending 50 year old men to the frontline in a total mobilization scenario would be poor practice, or for the same reason that you wouldn't train people with terrible eyesight to be pilots if you had the choice.
Not even as FPV drone pilots? I know my wife gets seasick when I show her J. Kenji Lopez-Alt's cooking videos, but surely not every woman's vestibular system is this underdeveloped.
Any skill requiring 3-demensional thinking and hand-eye coordination favors men. Video games and chess have proven this beyond all doubt.
I can't comment on the viability of women as drone pilots in the absence of men, but if you have men available you would obviously want them as a first option.
Beyond all doubt you say. What studies would you pull out if people demand evidence?
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I agree with your general point but lets also add some more recent culture war material.
Greta Gerwig which wrote the screenplay and directed Barbie is writing a Netflix film adaptation of first two films of Chronicles of Narnia. Considering her other films I suspect it is going to go much further than the older Disney adaptation in subverting the original material as this article persuasively argues. https://religionunplugged.com/news/2023/7/28/how-barbie-shows-greta-gerwig-is-the-wrong-choice-to-direct-narnia
But I would expect even a current Disney adaptation to also go much further.
The article ends with
I would really like to see an alternative. Maybe the people who have successfully made some level of youtube career out of condemning hated woke adaptations that disrespect the original material should pool resources together and try to create themselves some faithful adaptations, starting with less ambitious targets. The Critical Drinker who is a writer might be able to do something interesting. There is a real audience out there willing to pay for faithful adaptations, and there is money to be made. Like we have alt social media and video platforms, although it would be much more expensive, it would be nice to see an attempt for an alternative platform for tv shows and films.
If copyright is an issue, there are stories in the public domain like Ivanhoe, and more that will join them.
I stopped watching a while ago so I don't know how it's going, but the person who seems to have found the most success building a platform for conservative/outsider film-making is Dallas Jenkins. But I don't know that you can generate that sort of grassroots enthusiasm for most stories, even Christian ones. I think people are specifically willing to pay for his (pretty fun) take on the Gospels in a way they wouldn't for other products.
The Daily Wire is trying, but it's not looking good when the very critic you cite (who they actively courted) was lukewarm on their last movie (Ladyballers). Maybe Snow White will be good because they'll stick to the source material but we'll see.
I just don't think they can play at the sort of scale that does certain movies/properties justice (The first Narnia cost $180 million...a couple of decades ago). There's a reason Hollywood has a chokehold on blockbusters. Luc Besson got $200 million for Valerian after a surprise hit in Lucy, in an attempt to have his own franchise. It bombed, he will never see that sort of money again. Very few entities can absorb those losses.
My inner LLM thinks this is where someone should bring up the possibilities of using AI to level the playing field, at least somewhat.
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I am reminded of the recent trend in video game translation of also erasing references to gender, even in cases which were deemed non-offensive by Americans just 20 years ago: Pikmin 2 remaster, Live-A-Live remake, Yokai Watch (notable for also removing references to obesity and advisability of its negation), Resident Evil 4 VR, Attached Picture is of the TTYD remaster.
At least your example has the justification that C S Lewis wrote a different type of text (i.e. a novel), than one which producers needed (i.e. a screenplay), so changes were unavoidable. But a video game script in Japanese or in English is the same type of text, the only changes needed are those which are limitations of technology, like if the game engine only supports item and in-game characters names of 7 or less characters.
I think the justification for making even fictional socities blind to gender dimorphism in humans, is to make it unthinkable in reality. So that if the consumer of media does encounter someone not yet blinded, he is to made to feel perplexity (for making a distinction based on a difference of which the consumer doesn't perceive the existence) and hostility (according to contemporary mores, not making a distinction is the default, and insufficiently justifying making a distinction is called "discrimination" and highly frowned upon).
Such is one possible tool to socially construct a consensus of gender blindness.
/images/17168274960505376.webp
I've noticed a trend in character creation along those lines - 'male' and 'female' in character creation are replaced with 'body type 1' and 'body type 2', and then player characters are referred to exclusively as 'they'. World of Warcraft is an example of this. It frankly makes me feel very uncomfortable and aggressively dehumanised.
What I find most frustrating about it is that it seems like the progressive case against doing this should be obvious - removing all gendered words and enforcing a single pronoun on everyone seems like, well, misgendering. If you took seriously the concern that using the wrong gendered language for someone might be cruel or even traumatic, it seems like you should be sensitive to this, and want to provide more options, rather than throwing everyone into a de-gendered basket of 'they'.
I conclude that they do not in fact take seriously that concern, and that it was and is not the actual underlying motive. Or at least, if there's a motive along the lines of "don't be cruel", it is not applied evenly to everyone, and indeed making certain types of people uncomfortable might be good.
I have never understood this cope, they unambiguously code to "male" and "female" and if my memory is correct in ER they even correspond to a masculine and feminine voice when you select them.
That's another sign to me that it's not a particularly earnest gesture of inclusion - they are obviously male and female, with nothing changed but the names. No additional work has been done, so no additional expense has been incurred. From a development perspective, changing the names of the genders is a trivial task, and defaulting to singular they in all dialogue is slightly cheaper and easier than having distinct male and female variations.
The banner is inclusion, arguably, but the actual itself is profoundly lazy, and insofar as what it does is ignore or misgender everybody who identifies as anything other than they/them (which at last count was approximately everyone), it's actually less welcoming and inclusive.
But it's easy, it looks trendy and/or fits the cultural moment, and if it continues, by reducing the diversity and variability of humans - making everyone a bland, standardised they - it suits the interests of systems designers. A perfect symbol for the time, really.
(Yes, they're distinct male and female types now, but they don't need to be. For instance, in Splatoon 3 there are no gendered body types or identifications - everyone is just an androgynous little squid-kid. I guess the justification there would be that the characters are prepubescent and shouldn't have visibly different physical characteristics, but still, that is a long way from the time when the Pokémon manuals explicitly recommended that the children playing choose the character of their own gender.)
(Alternatively, consider the character creation in a game like BattleTech - there are no gender-locked features. It's been a little while since I played, but I believe that instead you just pick body characteristics from a big chart, so beards, breasts, etc., are perfectly interchangeable. Then at the end you pick pronouns from a drop-down menu. What's gone is any sense that these characteristics form two natural clusters. Instead of men and women, what we have are a bunch of isolated, chopped up body parts that can be reassembled in any combination. It's hard not to feel a bit dehumanised.)
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Modern progressives have focused exclusively on the valor of action in order to share this spoil with women, while ignoring both how much war sucks and how few women actually want to do all the shitty bits of combat, including the killing. The reason women weren't shoved into the frontlines for war wasn't because of sexism, its because most women can't do the really shitty bits of war as well as men: marching with heavy shit, digging, being transported in uncomfortable deathtraps without puking, having some asswipe yell at you just to keep your head screwed on, sleeping in odd positions. Fuck, most MEN can't do that shit, which is why all-volunteer militaries outperform unwilling conscripts.
In modern hollywood we largely see women being graceful acrobatic spinny shits, or snipers/pilots/archers, anything that stops them being up close to shit that punches back. Wheedonified tiny women acrobatically backflipping dudes into walls or vidya chicks stabbing weightless blades through armored trolls has given a throughly wrong impression that men and women have 0 physical difference, both because of political correctness and progressive men being gym allergic 'intellectuals'.
Women being given 'permission' to fight just makes them ballerinas getting military medals instead of flowers at the end of a performance, not chumps getting chewed out by artillery or dying from malnutrition. Frontline fighting sucks, get your free applebees by doing shit meatheads hate, like safety PowerPoint
Essentially, they want all the valor that men get out of war, when valor was the tiniest concession that men received in return for putting up with pure horror and misery. Just without all the downsides.
Frankly I don't blame women for this. Exceedingly few women are out there clamoring for girlbosses on the front lines, with most ads for female military recruitment focusing on (much needed) POG intel or maintenance shit.
No, the ones seething at the lack of female participation are progressive MEN who do not have even the concession of a dennys veterans meal accorded to them. If military valor is not an exclusively male thing, then you are not a failure of a man for not achieving military valor. Not that people actually consider military valor much of a special achievement anymore, but progressives simply need to diminish the achievements of the men they will never be in order to make themselves look less failson.
Don't you think "this achievement is actually not very valued today" diminishes your psychoanalysis?
Maybe. its still not a 0, and its still largely men getting this accord, so progressives keep acting to diminish it further or claim women/gays/minorities are the real beneficiaries of a valorized history - all the kvetching about any WW2 show not having enough blacks or how the supercool vikings really were 40% women raiders. I don't see progressives trying to get more women into waste disposal or being day laborers, but I call that a wash since media doesnt give a shit about those guys either.
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Let’s be real, most people seething at the “lack of female participation” are angry young men upset at perceived unfairness in the gender wars. That’s true here as much as elsewhere. I should add that I have no issues conscripting women, but sending them to the front lines would be strategically stupid in any case, whatever one’s ideology.
100% true. Those men are weaklings whining that they're discriminated against wammins, idiots who use conscription as merely another cudgel in their war against women. Not a single one of these idiots actually has any intention or capability of fighting, conscripted or otherwise. Grunts dont (usually) doubt the bravery of women, they doubt their stamina to carry 100lb of shit on a 5 mile or even 30lb of shit in a sustained sprint.
There are plenty uses for shitbirds in service that there is plenty of shit for women to do outside of frontline roles. The US army is not a lean mean fighting machine with spess mehrines ready to solo a terrorist base, its a methed out powerbottom using its ridiculously organic logistical capability to vomit a Starbucks onto a FOB within 48 hours of the HESCO fortress being setup. Conscripting women would just mean the milspec mafia would need to find a new way to skate. This still doesn't solve the progressive problem of women not getting to participate in the 'glory' of war, so I'm not sure they would stop bitching about women 'not being allowed' to serve.
As much as I appreciate a colorful analogy…chill out. Disagreeing with you doesn’t categorically make someone a weakling, whiner, idiot, or whatever. Be more specific or be more tactful.
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I'm still not convinced that "getting to participate in the glory of war" is a significant progressive issue anywhere other than videogames. They might want the college benefits, though.
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What does he mean here? This could either mean that women fight dirty and thus make the battle ugly, or it could mean that women having to fight means women getting wounded and killed and being forced to wound and kill others which is itself ugly. Or it could mean that only in a most desperate and ugly battle for one's very survival do we forgo our principles and make women to fight because we need every last body at any cost.
It's this, combined with the fact that women are a distraction when discipline and focus are paramount. If you've ever trained in martial arts you know the air is charged differently when a woman is in the gym and the minds of men will wander.
I think it's just the horses vs. elephants thing discussed over at ACOUP. Yeah, horses may freak out when they encounter an elephant in combat. But if you train the horses around elephants, they'll get used to the elephants, and then they can deal with elephants in combat just fine.
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EDIT: my club HOR linked turned out to be fake. How embarrassing. This protest movement probably does not have hipster appeal.
In Germany, it's illegal to sing songs that can be considered hate speech or aligned with Nazi ideology.
Several days ago, at a beach club in Northern Germany, a video went viral of a bunch of drunken Germans singing along to dance music track with lyrics that say "Germans for Germany, Foreigners Out" https://youtube.com/watch?v=xZZztdyd0PQ
Authorities have announced criminal investigations in response, though this does not appear to be silencing the hipster youth of Germany from enjoying the song. More recently, this popped up in an "underground" techno broadcast at Club HÖR https://x.com/kunley_drukpa/status/1794390427388588274
Is this an actual hipster event? Yes. They have their origins in illegal parties being done in basements or warehouses where everyone is hurrying to get their dance on before the authorities shut it down. Though they're much more popular now, they have kept the subversive raw industrial space motif.
Isn't this scene aligned with gay and otherwise leftist social mores? Yes. Typically, German techno is LGBTQ-coded and events can feature anything-goes public displays of sexual activity.
Are they just dropping the track because its beat is sick? Absolutely not. The song was originally produced by an incredibly cheesy Italian producer-DJ as a club anthem. In the hipster spaces this is as cringe as it comes. You would have to kill yourself if you dropped this as a place like HÖR. Perhaps the sickening cheesiness of the song is having its sign flipped because the insipid romancey lyrics were replaced with illegal German nationalism?
Hot anti-immigration thoughtcrime breaking out into the subversive mainstream but still fashioning-itself-as-underground techno scene in Germany is an unexpected development, though it did not come without foreshadowing. The "far right" Alternative for Deutschland party (AfD), is apparently now the most popular party among 14-29 year olds.
https://www.rbb24.de/panorama/beitrag/2024/04/jugendstudie-2024-jugend-in-deutschland-pessimismus-zukunftsangst.html
via Google Translate:
For most of its life, the AfD party was previously associated with square, middle-aged, clearly uncool xenophobes.
The parallels between this and the alt-right in the US around the early Trump era are noticeable. It appeared that the youth of America was so tired of cringe progressivism that their parents were into that the alt-right acted as a kind of new punk, though in the US the alt-right evaporated fairly quickly after Trump was elected.
In Germany in 2024, aligning with nationalism may be analogous to a kind of new punk that will definitely freak out your parents and set you apart from the older lamer generations. Can this translate into a revolution? As above, being the most popular party among young people in Germany doesn't say much because young people are not the biggest voting bloc, and unlike in the US there are many more political parties.
Still, this is probably going to stump historians of techno for years to come. (Or not! Since my hipster club link is fake. The other one with the preppies is probably real though)
Is the techno/rave subculture still a relevant thing in Germany? I assumed it peaked sometime in the late '90s.
It was cracked down on in the US in the late 90s due to adjacency with organized crime. Techno producers had to just up and move away from NYC to Berlin to continue their work. I'm not really sure what it was like in the 90s in Germany vs now, but it seems like it's all over the place in Berlin today.
Big, if true. Can you provide a source?
I was too young to see it happen but I've heard it from a lot of people.
My sources would be me ex-post facto searching for links that confirm gossip that I've heard. I think that would be a waste of your time tbh and I'll just say what I know.
Giuliani famously started rigorously enforcing cabaret laws in NYC, shutting dance clubs down.
There were similar pressures in Chicago though I think not Detroit.
(and if you were a techno producer-DJ living in NYC in the 90s you would probably prefer to move to Berlin than Detroit)
I also dated an older woman who was a record artist (like, a person that illustrates vinyl records) who said all of her techno clients moved to Berlin during this period.
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The part of the German Berlin club subculture that English-speaking foreigners may know of (stuff like Berghain) is a largely (literally) gay niche, even among hedonistic urban young people. Techno is definitely still a thing, sure.
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I would swear I saw that clip months ago. Am I misremembering or is this being misreported by 𝙿𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚜 @ ℝ𝕖𝕡𝕦𝕓𝕝𝕚𝕔 𝕠𝕗 ℂ𝕙𝕒𝕕 | ʟᴇᴠᴇʟ-ʜᴇᴀᴅᴇᴅ ᴀɴᴅ ᴄʀᴇᴅɪʙʟᴇ ᴀᴄᴄᴏᴜɴᴛ || འབྲུག་?
In addition, the video does not feature anyone singing the actual song, it's a DJ playing music that could be overlaid with any sound. The audio itself sounds like more of recording of a bar or party than a nightclub too, but that's just my impression.
It is easy for me to believe that there is a substantial minority of young German men who would agree with the above sentiment. It is much harder to believe that the chant would occur at a huge Berlin nightclub with a largely progressive audience without any major audible booing. By the way, on the average night a substantial minority (probably upwards of 20%, if not much more) of clubgoers at somewhere like Hör would be German-speaking minorities, so the idea is even more ridiculous.
That's in addition to it being posted by a shitposter.
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Insane how far things have gotten in Germany.
In my mind, right-wing is the true counterculture. But I am a contrarian and most people are not.
I think the model of young people as rebels a bit flawed. In many ways young people are slavishly conformist. Think of a high school clique. Or think of the various social movements that became purity spirals, with people cast out over tiny doctrinal differences.
Young people do want... something. They're not sure what they want exactly, but they know they want it hard. This energy can form the base for many political movements, but it's actual direction can be molded from outside. Mao realized this when he created the Cultural Revolution, weaponizing the energy of the young to cow his rivals.
Maybe today's new "rebels" will be a true counterculture, like the hippies of the 1960s, largely an organic movement undirected from the outside. More likely, the rebels will be completely co-opted by the people already in charge, and will be used to fight their intra-elite battles. It's pretty amazing how today's Antifa members have nearly the exact same ideology as a Harvard professor or WaPo journalist. "What do we want! The current regime – but even harder!", they chant as they throw a trashcan through a Starbucks window.
I don't know if younger people are more conformist by nature but they are undoubtedly far more sensitive to social pressure from their peers. In most cases this manifests as conformity to whatever's popular, but it also means the returns on bold individualism can be far greater.
Yes, in absolute value, but the sign is negative.
Bold individualism in the sense of pioneering a new musical genre of style of clothing etc.
Sure, but unless the counterculture is classically liberal/in the middle of a genuinely prosperous age (which is generally the cure to "social pressure from one's peers) it just turns into "boldly advocating for 50 Stalins". One of the more visible new youth styles of clothing, "men in ill-fitting dresses", is ultimately (and perhaps ironically) more conformant to social pressure than not doing that.
True, but we do live in funny times. I'll admit I'm not an expert on the history of such things, but my understanding had been that it was teens who pioneered things like punk, grunge etc that weren't exactly aligned in every way with the Cathedral of their times.
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Can you say more about why you think that?
I'd be interested in his answer too, but the basic case is pretty simple: being a part of that subculture puts you at risk of exclusion from polite society, therefore it's a counterculture. Calling it "the true" counterculture might be going to far, I'm sure there's plenty of other groups that can lay claim to being countercultural, but this one's by far the biggest.
It doesn't exist enough to be a "subculture". Being a right-winger is like being the class clown or something; you may be counter, but you're not culture.
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It holds every value of the current zeitgeist in contempt, and values things that the current zeitgeist hates. The CZ wants a libertine society and the youth are off insisting on traditional values and culture and religion. The youth are so trad at thins point that not only are they religious but in the case of catholic youth, they’re going for Latin Mass and fighting popes and bishops to get it.
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The one article is interesting because it says the far-right is being spread on tick-tock. In the U.S. we generally view tick-tock as China spreading ideologies that weaken our nationalism (transgender, river to sea Hamas stuff).
Perhaps this is just counter-culture that the young do because they are young and rebel. But rebellion for rebellion sake implies that the rebellion is wrong and fueled by misinformation. What if this is real and being fueled by a realization that the old emperor has no clothes? And open-borders suck for Germans? That Germany as they know it won’t exists in 50 years and they will be a conquered people?
Plenty of stuffy blue tribers will claim ticktock spreads pro-Trump sentiment, or worry about like tradwife content or whatever. I think the common denominator is that old, established people just don't like ticktock and it spreads mildly taboo things.
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Everything bad is spread on social media for a certain generation.
It could be anorexia, it could be communism, transgenderism, it could be fascism, it could be islamism. TikTok is just the new thing, before it was Instagram, then Facebook, then MySpace or whatever else (or indeed just 'the internet').
As well as judaism or philosemitism, we need to protect our kids.
If you were a relatively fresh user, I’d warn you to put more effort and tact into your position. If I thought you were being facetious to make a point about 2rafa’s subject, I’d remind you to speak plainly.
Neither of those things are true. You have a long history of one-liners and a longer history of insisting one particular group is actually the worst. I conclude that you’re proudly ignoring our rules about evidence and effort specifically to remind everyone that you despise your outgroup.
Banned for one week.
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Social media tends to amplify things that are trendy locally. And extremism tends to get trendy because the people who like it watch it, and those who don’t like it tend to hate-watch it. Since it’s getting lots of views it goes to the top. But since what people get excited about varies by community, you can easily find the same SM platform promoting opposing views to different people.
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I think it's important to note that "ideologies that weaken our nationalism" doesn't specify an inherent political direction, and seems to look more like amplifying scissor statements to make us mad at each other. I think the modal example looks less like high-level direction to allow trans athletes in women's sports, and more like observing that people have surprisingly strong feelings on the issue (fairness vs. inclusion) and constantly highlighting the issue in ways that maximize outrage on both sides.
In much the same vein, I thought a lot of the 2016 Russiagate coverage was inherently counterproductive. Sure, maybe the Russian intelligence apparatus wanted Trump to win to stoke discord in American politics, but from where I sit it looks like we devolved into political infighting almost more over the specter of such meddling than from the actual political actions themselves: The rumors and investigations of their involvement seem to me have been far more pernicious for American unity than any of the direct actions.
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Their party looked so preppy I can't in good faith call it punk or even hipster.
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Do you really think the audio recording is actually from Club HÖR? By all means, find it in the original recording, although after watching (an actually pretty decent set of) all 53 minutes, you will find that it does not happen. In fact, the audience doesn't feature in the recording at all. Go back and look at their other livestreams, does it seem realistic to you?
Drukpa is a DR shitposter. In future, trust your instincts with regards to these things. Leftist Berlin hipsters are not singing "Ausländer raus" in techno clubs, please. I'm sure young men are in some of the more extremist burschenschaften, but that's a rather different milieu (and there is, in any case, nothing new about that).
Ugh. Looks like I have been duped. It was too good to check.
Part of the reason I was susceptible to this is because I was at a techno party in a junkyard in Berlin a few years ago and someone passed a bottle of Jagerneister to me and I asked what this big iron cross on bottle was supposed to mean. The guy who handed the bottle to me got up and screamed "it means I am Adolf Hitler!" and everyone nearby laughed and said HEIL HITLER!
Confused, but not sure what else to do, I took a drink and we moved on.
Anyway, the idea that there might be a Nazi-for-the-lulz-at-the-minimum undercurrent in German youth was seeded in me then.
There's clearly an urge to troll.
That all said, my bad.
And teenage boys in the USA use the n word because it offends people, same thing.
Do they?
In the heydays of reddit, usernames like /u/niggerkiller etc were not uncommon, and were almost always seemingly just meant to be inflammatory for its own sake. Some people never grow out of this, of course. You could check the post history of such people and not find anything remotely murderous or seriously racist.
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Do your older siblings tell you you were adopted because they hate orphans, or do they do it because it gets to you in a way that other insults and teasing don't?
I know how trolling works. I just have a hard time imagining teenagers using n-word today is all.
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Ever been to 4chan?
(And yes, I know a few people in that demographic that do this constantly for that reason.)
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Yes. I mean girls usually don't, but adolescent males have a deep instinct to buck taboos. In the US that's anti-black racist rhetoric, in Germany that's flirting with national socialism.
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Yeah Drukpa's been posting random overlaid stuff like that on techno club videos for a while. I think the overton window is shifting a little, but Drukpa not a great souce for it.
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Has anyone found a full recording of Der verbotene Ohrwurm? I haven't checked the alt-tubes yet, but either nobody is putting it online, the regime is fighting very hard to keep it off, or quite possibly I'm retarded.
Comments on original versions of the song are either off the hook or just off.
Is there an actual song? I think people just dubbed a few verses on an existing tune.
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As it was written
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This song isn't new, it's been going around for at least a year, and I'm neither German nor hip to the latest social media, so my guess is that by the time I saw it it'd been going around for a while.
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Except that the alt-right youth in the US was a fringe social media phenomenon - in the 2020 exit polls, we see the young voting for Biden and the old voting for Trump. (The equivalent pattern in the UK is even stronger.) The alt-right youth thing in continental Europe is translating into right-populist parties doing as well (or occasionally better) among young people as they do among oldsters. Front National in France, the AFD in Germany, the FPO in Austria, PVV in the Netherlands, M5S in Italy are all turning out the youth vote in a way Trump or Farage profoundly doesn't.
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These don't look like hipsters at all though. They look like preppy rich kids.
Yes it had just been preppies up until the underground party. But nevermind that link is fake. So far just preppies?
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Maybe I'm living under a rock, but I never got the impression that the techno/rave subculture attracts preppy rich kids in particular anywhere. It's a hobby which does not entail spending large sums of money, as far as I can tell.
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For the PMC-leftist commentariat on Twitter this has been a wonderful event, because they could finally demonstrate that, yes, rich and pampered kids are right-wing. When in reality, in Europe, the most important predictor for left-wing vote is wealth, the richer you are, the more on the left you are.
Urban vs suburban/rural is the major predictor in Europe. This accounts, in real terms, for many sub-factors like ethnic background, religion or lack thereof, age, wealth, student status, political signalling etc.
Yes, I live in a generic left wing European city, but a few miles outside are villages where politics tends to vary from the Christian Democrats to the far right.
Some places like Poland are different, in that rural areas tend to be both more right wing and poorer, which is reflected in how Polish politics is divided more on social than economic grounds.
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Doesn't seem so according to this, for Germany. AfD voters tend to be low-income, but so are Linke and SPD voters.
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I think this controversy fully displays to what extent the whole "LGBTQ community" narrative is actually astroturfed. I don't even have to use my arguments, Douglas Murray said it better here. Apparently "homophobic", AfD party is very popular with gays in Germany. I'd dare to guess that gay men are the majority of techno party goers, so it does not surprise me the least that Deutschland für die Deutschen, Ausländer raus! would be popular among them. It is incredible to read through the article and watch the cognitive dissonance in real time.
The head of the AfD is, in fact, a lesbian. That said, the AfD is a highly broad tent party and includes libertarians, civic nationalists, ethnic nationalists of various kinds, some religious trads and so on.
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If you view AfD as a bulwark against Islamic immigration and Islamic immigrants as a major threat to gay people, then this is quite rational. This is also the reasoning behind Dawkinite atheists who, now that fundamentalist Christianity has receded as a threat to all but the most paranoid atheist, have turned their attentions to fundamentalist Islam.
Sure, but it's still a new and surprising development. Dawkinites turning their attention to Islam was a thing 10 years ago. In response feminists, LGTBQ+'s, and anti-racists decided to form Atheism+ and drive out the Dawkinsians. If what you're describing is happening again, then that is indeed a sign that the vibes have shifted, though a restart of New Atheism might be hard to pull off, given how much damage their core thesis of "Imagine no religion", or Science Trusting, took.
How much of this was ever a thing in Germany though?
One of our local Germans will have to go into the details on that, all I can tell you is that their PMC is extremely woke, from my experience. Then again, so is the rest of Europe these days.
It is and it is. Individuals may deviate, but they can do so only in very private, and any public dissdence is punished by deplatforming, fines, job loss and being forever smeared by all media, social and otherwise, as being either a neonazi or a useful idiot for whatever nebulous forces of evil are currently blamed for the existence of non-leftist thought (nowadays it's usually Putin). The exact level of enforcement varies wildly, but one is never safe to make any public statements that could be construed as "völkisch".
That wouldn't surprise me. What would surprise me is learning that the New Atheism - Atheism+ split also happened in Germany.
Well, it didn't. There was no split. The militant atheists appeared, most disappeared, and the ones that remained seamlessly converted to postmodern progressivism.
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Would this forum be of dubious legality in Germany?
Legality, no, I don't think so. I am certainly not a lawyer, but for all the stories of this or that platform being banned, I don't think the Motte fits the pattern.
But you certainly could end up in hot water in every sense other than legal if your name showed up next to some Motte quotes taken out of context.
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It depends: Douglas Murray was a neo-con back in the Noughties. I would need to see stats before I took a view on whether e.g. gay men are more anti-Islam or anti-immigration than they were back at that time.
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A handful of German party-goers privately wanting Germany for the Germans and no foreigners
-> inacceptable, punish severely.
Thousands of islamists publicly demanding the transformation of Germany into an islamic caliphate
-> that's freedom of opinion, we are a democracy.
I think it's safe to say that by revealed preferences, German society doesn't give a shit about the gays and our priorities are elsewhere. Probably somewhere in the broad region of the moral apex imperative of "be good people, good people punish nazis and tolerate foreigners".
Depends on whom you ask.
For much of German society, it's just a question of passport.
For the left-leaning parts of it, it's a question of residence.
The Right is divided on the issue.
What I would wish for is for them to jettison their entire cultural heritage, language faith and all, sever ties with their homeland and family and take German names as soon as they set foot on German soil, followed by which they trample pictures of Erdogan and Ataturk into the mud while parading around the streets singing our national hymn and holding aloft saintly effigies of Adenauer and Merkel. After which they go home and crack open some beers with their ethnically German neighbors. Later they tell their children traditional German fairy tales before eating a hearty pork dinner and washing it down with a Schnaps. Let them do that and alright, they are more German than most Germans.
But obviously the most assimilation we can expect is "speaks German without obnoxious 'migrant' patois" and "pays taxes in Germany". German as a culture is unattractive, and Turkish immigrants seem ethnically rather cohesive.
So here's a less ambitious standard: If they speak German and not Turkish, have abandoned Islam, have integrated into German society around them rather than into some Turkish enclave, and would support Germany over Turkey, then that's probably as close to German as can be expected. Even that is exceedingly rare though.
Any less than that and they're still a fifth column as far as I care.
Had Ataturk's regime not always been in a rather cordial relationship with all German governments that were in power throughout his presidency?
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The Dutch alt-right is pretty explicit about this. Pim Fortuyn was openly gay, and both Fortuyn and Geert Wilders have made "Muslim immigrants are violently homophobic, which is un-Dutch" key points in their campaign rhetoric.
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Regarding that Sylt video, what struck me most was how badly performed that act of rebellion was on a factual level. What is wrong with generation TikTok if they can't even LARP at being Nazis better than that? "Auslaender raus"? The 90s called, they want their NPD back. Today it is "Remigration von Bundesbuergern", which is way more offensive btw. Doing the Hitler Salute while also indicating the Hitler mustache with the other hand is something I have never seen outside of people making fun of Nazis, and would likely have gotten you into trouble in the third Reich.
Anyone who has two brain cells to rub together, went to school in Germany, and decides to annoy the mainstream by voicing Fascist thoughts should be able to do better than that. I mean, I don't expect a torch march while they sing the Host-Wessel-Lied, but would it be too much to ask that they perform the salutes correctly? I sure hope Hitler has youtube access in hell so that he knows what became of his ideology (not that it had not started out with drunk losers in the first place).
I am not saying that I approve of that kind of rebellion. It is like seeing a four-year-old who decides that he will annoy his parents by smearing dog turds in his face and then falls down as he tries to pick the poo up.
And just like I would not want that four-year-old being on national TV, I also don't think the Sylt people should be. From the way they act it seems likely that they are not what one would call satifaktionsfaehig (capable of giving satisfaction, i.e. in a duel). Now, if one of them was a leader in a youth group of a political party, that would be a reason for this video to make the news. And if this is part of some weird TikTok trend where this is among the top ten things in Germany, it would be fair to report about that.
I mean, if a court decides that they violated the law and makes them pay a fine, I am totally okay with that. But I don't like like mobs, and there will always be some who will see this as their opportunity to prove what valiant anti-fascists they are.
Presumably it's less easy to chant that to a Gigi D'Augustino tune.
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What's interesting in this thread is how esteemed the concepts like 'counterculture', 'rebellion', 'new punk' and so on are. There should presumably, especially to conservtives, be nothing particularly special about being counterculture, insofar as 'counterculture' ever existed.
Between a lot of people here having their roots in the left, and appreciation for fighting for what's right, regardless of societal pushback, probably being a universal quality, how is that interesting at all?
I wasn't thinking about the forums only, also more generally. Punk used to be considered an actual threat to society, evidence of civilizational decay. It is interesting that it has become a moniker for "fighting for what's right" and so on, even among the more conservative section. Likewise, being "countercultural" by itself would indicate being satisfied with a certain niche status instead of taking over the actual general culture - sure, countercultural movements have gone mainstream, many times, but this has also meant a loss of status inside the self-considered "counterculture" itself.
I dunno, it's not exactly mind-blowing that even people I'm vehemently against are fighting for what they believe is right. I also have no issues admitting it takes a special kind of person to commit to such a fight, when all "respectable" society is against you, and to admire that, even when I disagree with what they're trying to achieve.
Oh, that might be an actual thing that changed. I think there's a whole bunch of factions, not just conservatives, that written off mainstream society, and are just looking for ways for their communities to survive whatever the powers that be have in store for us.
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That's the effect of five decades of large segments Anglo-American media being absolutely obsessed with counterculture & rebellion. We're luckily somewhat isolated here in Finland (when did you last hear journalists hyping "working class artist / musician" as a term outside niche stuff?). Alas, it has leaked everywhere in English speaking countries (although I'd love to hear any Australian / New Zealand perspective on this).
One of my complaints about privacy and digital hygiene obsession that's so in vogue with early middle aged white people is that they all appear to believe that they're subversives, potential enemies of the state, and that they best adopt Signal for e2e messaging privacy, and use VPNs to avoid tracking, and limit their socials, etc.
There are other reasons to care about digital hygiene, but the most anodyne people worrying that the FBI is maintaining a dossier about them is probably an effect of five decades of media obsession with counter-culture and rebellion.
Nevertheless, the FBI (or some three-letter agency) is indeed maintaining a dossier about them. It's just a very boring dossier.
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In the current political climate, early middle age white people are probably more likely to be an FBI target than almost anyone else. It's hard to accuse a trans black woman of being a white supremacist. Also, they probably have more to lose from an FBI investigation than anyone else; you can't lose your job or family if you don't have one.
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Do you also complain about people buying insurance? The chances of your house being set on fire or destroyed are vanishingly small, so these people are just throwing money away for no good reason. Similarly, why waste time putting on a seatbelt when going for a drive? You're probably not going to be in a crash after all, so why subject yourself to the discomfort and wasted time?
Information security and privacy are probably not going to be terribly important for the average person, but you don't know if you're going to be in the minority for whom it becomes exceedingly important and the techniques used to protect yourself cannot be applied retroactively.
I guess I consider the odds that your online communications will be intercepted and used against you are much, much more unlikely than your house burning down or being in a car accident.
I think this is because in the back of my mind I don't expect to receive at any time a call that we must start pitching molotov cocktails at the courts and then escape the state's retribution, whereas I suspect deep down a lot of people harbor that feeling. Or some other fanciful counter-cultural notion. And in that case I will regret not having swung everything over to Signal several years prior.
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My friend I literally just linked an article last week about the FBI skimming through everyone's credit card purchases for "suspicious activity."
Sure, but there's a >99.999% chance the people worried about this don't do anything edgy or counter-culture enough for the FBI to look twice at.
People here don't buy guns or gun accessories that the Biden administration is trying to use administrative procedure to make retroactively illegal?
People here don't read books the FBI considers "warning signs of domestic extremism" such that buying them puts you on an investigation list? We didn't have literally a thread about those books a few months ago?
FC might have something to say about that.
Citation linked for the 5th time btw because apparently nobody ever reads them or just pretends it never happened EVERY SINGLE TIME
Hold up. What's the specific claim? I'm not a huge guns guy but I do remember having to submit to a background check for both a rifle and a handgun. Additionally, I understand if I purchase a suppressor this requires multiple submittals to various agencies. I fully understand and don't really... worry... that they know all about my gun life? What impact is a consumer VPN service or switching to Signal going to have on any of this? What does the FBI scanning bank records have to do with this?
SteveKirk believes, with fairly credible reason, that the federal and some state governments is working in coordination with various online and meatspace merchants to track the sales of major firearm components, in an attempt to track down people who are manufacturing 3d printed or other self-produced guns.
((And while SteveKirk hasn't said it explicitly, I think the feds probably also are trying to track down likely owners of guns sold in private sales who use them enough to modify or require repairs of major components, for both manufacturing charges and to prepare state efforts trying to 'close' private sales or interstate or unregistered ammunition sales, such as California and New York.))
This is bad enough in the sense that it's not actually illegal in many jurisdictions that it's being covered in, and plausibly unconstitutional even in the states that do ban it, but that's just the surface level problem. If you own a 3d printer and normally-bought guns that you're maintaining without producing any 3d-printed weapons, you might avoid a conviction (or even a trial!) should a bunch of ATF agents break down your door looking for guns, but it won't bring your dog back to life. Same for stuff that 'looks like' silencer material.
There are also bump stock or (more often) pistol brace components that have been retroactively banned, after long periods where the ATF claimed they were legal, in ways quite a lot of gun owners who own these things -- and might put photos that get auto-cloud-uploaded, if they're particularly unlucky -- may not know they have been banned.
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At least in lefty circles, there has been a trend of saying that local hip-hop is "the new worker's music", but yeah.
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They are, at the minimum, exciting new brand development opportunities.