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Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the culture wars to me is that I repeatedly see attacks on principles so fundamental we don't even have explicit definitions for them, and then the battle lines that get drawn up are nowhere near that critical issue. Examples:
Censorship: in every HN thread people immediately start arguing about whether tech companies should be regulated to allow all speech, or whether private companies can do whatever they want and only the government is prevented from infringing on freedom of speech. Admittedly there is a "freedom of speech" principle at play here that does have a name, but everyone seems to have forgotten that it meant we were supposed to be tolerant of opinions that we don't agree with, which has almost nothing at all to do with terms of service on huge tech platforms. I think Scott is one of the few people I've ever seen address that directly (both in tolerating the outgroup and another article more directly about free speech). But there's a second issue even more central to censorship by big tech platforms: they all claimed to be huge proponents of free speech, gave soaring speeches during the Arab Spring about their high minded principles. Abandoning that is something that should cause us to withdraw a lot of trust and goodwill, even if we agree with their new policies. (Also, suspiciously, the two options people argue about both involve giving government and corporations more power: regulate big tech, or give up on free speech as a general principle. Don't get me started on astroturfing.)
Downthread there's a discussion about diversity casting in TV and movies. The most common argument I hear against it is that it's not appropriate for the setting, and the most common argument I see in favor is that people should be able to see characters that look like them. Those both sound fine to me, as far as they go. The deeper issue here only clicked for me when my facebook friend said to a Mermaid-traditionalist "if you're arguing that a Black little mermaid doesn't seem to fit the role, are you going to say the same thing when a Black woman applies to a job?" And I realized, right, the original claim was that Hollywood (mostly implicitly or systemically, less-so explicitly) racistly excluded people who weren't white and pretty. Which sure looks true - I was blown away when I started noticing how many things failed the Bechdel Test. But now we've replaced that with explicit, proudly-advertised activism, yet the battle lines are drawn such that we've just flip-flopped on who's wearing the fig-leaf of "[white/black/gay/trans] Ariel seemed like the appropriate artistic choice". Meanwhile we've damaged two deeper principles: keeping politics out of where it doesn't belong, and actually meaning it when we said that we wanted race not to matter.
Also downthread is a debate about whether it's okay to spell out racial slurs here. And I remember the wave of renamings that started with what seemed like a ridiculous objection to "master/slave" used in the context of IDE hard drives, and ended a few years later with those terms actually being renamed in a lot of technical contexts. In both cases the battle lines are drawn along "these words hurt people / replacing them causes more harm than gain". But the deeper issues to me are about injecting politics into places it shouldn't be (same with fast food joints becoming politically loaded), and the notion that we shouldn't taboo words at all. There was a brief period a few years ago when atheism was winning and we were all proud of the fact that we could say curse-words and anything else we wanted without the sky-fairy torturing us forever. Now we've flipped sides on that too.
Ultimately this boils down to two problems I worry a lot about. One is that the whole idea of having principles at all seems to have much less support than it should; people simply don't notice or care as much as they should about flip-flops or even expecting anyone to state or stand by a consistent set of principles at all. And while this isn't a place with obvious battle lines, I've noticed people quietly excusing it here and there. It's not immediately obvious why it matters to have principles! And I think this is why it's easy for people to discard. But it's really important! Principles are what let us be predictable agents, able to work with others who aren't part of our tribe and don't share all our values. That seems, like, utterly critical to any kind of functioning society, but I had to re-derive it for myself because nobody seems to talk about it.
The other is that the principles that people are discarding are so fundamental, so dyed in the wool for civilization, that we don't have explicit names for them or standard answers as to why they should be preserved. I noticed this when I saw JBP proclaim "tell the truth" as one of his 12 rules for life -- it was like, oh, right, that's really important, isn't it? How did I lose sight of that? Things like "words shouldn't be redefined by political fiat", "leaders should be held to high standards of personal integrity", "you should be prepared to explain yourself and lose status when you abandon a principle you endorsed", "don't inject politics into non-political contexts". All those seem to me like load-bearing walls for civilization, and we shouldn't dismantle them just to get an advantage in some other debate.
To end on a positive note, I do think this is an addressable problem. But we have to be quicker to look past the officially endorsed battle lines, find the valuable nameless things that are being sacrificed, contemplate them long enough to describe why they're important, and then defend them directly. That's actually been a silver lining for me: now there are a bunch of load-bearing pillars of civilization I've actually noticed and contemplated. I just wish it wasn't because someone was trying to burn them down.
What are under-appreciated values you see that routinely get sacrificed to Moloch in the culture war?
They are load bearing walls for this civilisation, which is a very unique take on human existence that has been around for few centuries at absolute most. The SocJus professional class, who are busy knocking said walls down, are doing so because it is highly unlikely that their enemies will ever sieze control of important institutions like payment providers or media platforms.
As for dead values, I miss how willing people were to read and write lengthy things. You can go and read old news articles on news outlets and they are significantly longer and more verbose than the stuff that is put out now. Any idea that cannot be condensed into a tweet struggles to spread, and I think this is one of many reasons politics is the way that it is now.
And say lengthy things, and listen to lengthy things, and use complex vocabulary within those lengthy things ...
But although I too am astonished at how many IQ points even otherwise intelligent writers seem to lose when forced to express themselves in tweet form, the decline long predates Twitter.
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These are your principles though, not intrinsic principles. I personally think media is a great way to talk about politics and historically it's been a common practice (think of older novels with political messages, etc). Regardless, most media is political even when it's not explicit. You can make an argument that politics doesn't belong in movies but it's just an argument, not a deeper societal principle.
Along the same lines, 'not wanting race to matter' is fully loaded as well. I'm not sure where you stand on this issue, but there's plenty of proponents on either side of this debate. It's hardly a deeper principle.
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That's what grinds my gears; the smug assumption that the only reason anyone could possibly object to such race-swapping is because they're a horrible racist. (Payne and McKay are playing that card, too, in their most recent interview; "no, people aren't objecting because we are ten-time losers who can't write for shit, it's because they're racists!")
And would your Facebook friend who is so eager to change things up for the sake of diversity be happy to recast Mulan so that a Black woman could get the lead role? And if that's different, how is it different? "The Little Mermaid" is a story by the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen, however it was adapted by Disney. If they're going to recast Ariel, then every cast member should be Black for internal consistency and coherence.
Can your Facebook friend explain to me why new Black Ariel is still a redhead, and not having her own ordinary beautiful natural hair?
Nobody is objecting to "let's do a new movie about a black mermaid" if they can write a good story and hey, maybe there are even folk tales and legends about black mermaids, who knows? But this isn't about 'let's give little Black girls a character they can identify with, so they can dress up as Ariel for Hallowe'en', it's about wringing every last penny out of their property by re-tooling it to get another extension of marketability.
That wasn't atheism winning, that was Christianity no longer being a sufficient cultural force to stop people saying "fuck the sky-fairy". So long, of course, as it was the Christian sky-fairy you were mocking; the Jewish, Muslim, or other indigenous traditions sky-fairies were out of bounds.
When it lost you money to support gay rights, companies didn't support gay rights. When it lost you money not to support gay rights, companies slapped rainbows and photos of same-sex couples on everything.
I think a big problem is that people are not only not taught to think, but are actually taught to avoid thinking (while being told that they’re being taught to be “critical thinkers”(tm)). Even in schools—especially in schools— you are much more likely to be graded worse for original thinking and skeptical thinking about the common narratives than by simply parroting what you’ve been told is true. And now, watching the way our culture treats those few brave souls who do speak out, they’re well aware that questioning means losing your livelihood for saying the wrong thing.
Given the lack of logic and statistics taught, I dare say that the vast majority of Americans are incapable of noticing the inconsistencies in their ideas. They haven’t been taught to notice that we were against X until we were for it because they never thought through the logic of X. They don’t notice that ideas A and B rely on contradicting ideas and that it’s thus impossible to logically hold both to be true at the same time.
It’s really weird to watch people trust the science when the science tells them two or three mutually exclusive things and they believe them all.
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Good question! I'm glad it's my friend who I know a little about and not a rando on twitter. Her quote surprised me because it seemed to imply that a black person happened to try out for the role and was picked on merit, just as when somebody applies for a random office job. I look at the situation and see politics in movie casting, she's assuming some poor actress did her best and is getting attacked by people looking to disqualify her on ostensibly artistic but actually racist grounds.
She's what I call a social-justice Mormon: very Mormon, but also posts lots of SJW stuff. If she sat down and thought about it, I don't think she'd be on board with the extremist smash-the-patriarchy stuff. And one of my criticisms of a lot of SJW stuff is that it obfuscates things like this -- it's happy to let her believe that the role was based on artistic and acting merit. But I think she'd be sympathetic to my white friend who's a children's book author and keeps getting discriminated against for being white.
That's why I think it's more productive to focus on the deeper principles than the pre-drawn battle lines. She could probably have a productive conversation with us about the hazards of putting politics where it doesn't belong, because she remembers at some level that her grandparents were wary of that. But when people say "artistically it's just not appropriate for Ariel the mermaid to be black" while BLM is telling her they're secretly white supremacists, well, that's a much harder sell, and we'll have to have the argument all over again when it's trans Joan of Arc.
The trouble is, people are leaping from "if you say it's not appropriate for Ariel to be black" to "then you mean it's not appropriate for any mermaid to be black", which is a whole other conversation and assumption.
If they made a new movie with a black mermaid and gave her a different name and a different costume (and that's my point about the red hair: these are the identifying elements of Ariel as created by Disney, she has red hair and dresses in blue, just as Snow White has black hair and a red ribbon, and Belle has a yellow dress - little girls are very insistent on these elements to be correct or else it's not really Ariel or Belle or Cinderella or whomever) then yeah, objecting to black mermaids could be put down to "this is racism, would you say the same thing to a black woman applying for a job?"
But it's not, this is very specifically Ariel the Mermaid, an already created character with her set iconography and years of marketing to establish her, and making her black (while retaining all the rest of the iconography, including the red hair), then it's about cash grabbing and about hopping aboard the DEI bandwagon with as much sincerity as a cannibal declaring he's vegan (because my last meal was vegan, I asked him before I cooked him and he told me he was a vegan).
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I was raised in a religious community and I marvel at how many of today's social justice advocates are literally the same people who were the nosy church ladies in decades past. Not just the same sorts of people--the same specific people. Some of them are still church ladies, too--but those who have stopped being church ladies did not ride out on a wave a new atheism. Instead they rode out on a wave of righteous indignation concerning gay marriage or some other social issue they saw their church as being "out of touch" on. Thinking through my extended family, this category covers about a third of the women, but not one man in ten.
Actually, now that I'm drawing up tallies, I'm realizing with a dull non-surprise that none of the formerly-religious men in my extended family who took up atheism in the last, oh, three decades or so have adopted any "social justice" views as a result, while far more than half of the women (a smaller absolute number) who severed ties with their churches are now extremely vocal leftists. This harmonizes with demographic reports I've seen but I'd never before sat down and really thought about it.
It's hard for me to model such a complete lack of principles without referencing the NPC meme. But the best I can manage is just that these are people who are predisposed, for whatever reason, to enforce social expectations to the best of their ability. One day they woke up and saw that the social expectation that they go to pride parades was stronger than the social expectation that they go to church potlucks, so they stopped making casseroles and started making rainbow flags. Charitably, social cohesion is just the point for them; less charitably (but maybe more accurately from an evopsych perspective), the opportunity to snub others while raising one's own status in the most powerful in-group may also be an attractive position.
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People assume that there's some sort of racial issue behind the Ariel situation because: A) the scenario is so inconsequential and B) the arguments against it are either weak or slippery-slope assumptions. This doesn't mean that anyone who is anti Ariel is racist, but it does leave the door open to wonder why anyone would be so vehemently against this move.
Most Disney princesses are white, including Ariel. Mulan isn't. Disney is (openly) pro-diversity, so it makes sense that Disney would want an Asian princess too.
There aren't any rules or reasons as to why the recasting of one character should lead to the recasting of all characters.
Why does Ariel's hair have anything to do with race of the character? Moreover, Ariel's red hair was one of the characters' defining features in comparison to the other princesses of the time.
The functional difference between "let's do a new movie about a black mermaid" and "let's do a remake about a black mermaid" are quite inconsequential. Both versions exist, and given that we're talking about a children's character, both characters existing has no real ramifications for practical life.
Look, I hate the shameless antics of Disney as much as anyone, but is that really what this discussion is about? What does Ariel's red hair have to do with Disney's endless greed? And did this penny-wringing really start with Ariel? More importantly, if the Ariel was white, would this still be an example of Disney's greed?
If you can recast a white mermaid, why can't you recast a Chinese warrior princess? The fact that there is any denial that you can do one but you can't do the other, because - well, because isn't it obvious why?
Yes, it's obvious, and it makes nonsense out of the claims that it's all about Representation. If one set of fairy stories or legends can't be touched, but another set can, then it's not about "little Black girls want to see princesses like themselves". If that were the case, then more stories like Tiana (in the revamped version of "The Princess and The Frog") are what you do. Why can't little Black girls see themselves as warrior princesses, if it is so important they see themselves as mermaids? Why not have a Black mermaid - who isn't Ariel?
If we accept Disney's reasoning that they want more diversity in their princess lineup, it doesn't make a ton of sense to recast Mulan as non-Asian. Mulan is the only (I think?) Asian princess, recasting her would a) remove the only Asian princess and b) keep the princess lineup diversity numbers the same. Both options wouldn't make sense under Disney's explanation of wanting more diversity. Plus, you could argue that Mulan's race makes logical sense as the movie is set in Asia whereas Ariel's race doesn't have any relevance to the movie's location.
I'm not saying that I totally disagree with this but I also don't think this is a significantly better option than black Ariel. FAriel as a character (& IP) is much more culturally relevant & valuable than Tiana. The 'classic' Disney princesses are icons worldwide. In terms of 'equality', it's simply more meaningful to add diverse characters to an iconic group of characters rather than creating a brand new character without any prior history or cultural significance.
It really depends on how you define and value diversity. For me, diversity isn't about simple quotas or shoeing in as many minorities as possible. It's about true inclusion and an honest effort to make things as practically equal as possible. Making a black mermaid would be the easy way out for Disney and these corporations always choose the easiest, most performative route in terms of public acceptance. This move surprised me but I encourage it since it's a better way of doing diversity than we've done in the past.
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They're not wrong--but "racial issue" doesn't mean "the complainer is racially prejudiced".
If companies prioritize race above things that otherwise lead to better quality works, and if this manifests by creating a black Ariel, that's a "racial issue". If they do so by race-baiting their audience so they can make more money, that's greed.
I disagree with your framing completely. What if the black actress was the best actress for the job? What if she's the one who worked the hardest? Who says that an Ariel movie with a black actress will be lower quality than one with a white actress? These are all huge assumptions that you're making. The movie won't be released for months anyway, it's far too soon to make any quality judgements. This is only a conversation because Ariel is black. No one is wondering if choosing a white actor for Willy Wonka is the right decision, or if there were any 'racial issues' surrounding casting his role. No one is asking if a black actor would have led to a higher quality movie. It really just seems like people have a problem with the black actress and that's racial prejudice.
Further, why is it suddenly news that Disney is greedy? They've been this way since the 50s and they're not stopping now. Plus, Disney as a company is driven by money - pandering to audiences has been a valid sales tactic since the beginning of time. Why is that suddenly not ok? And why does choosing a black actress spur this discussion so intensely?
There are more white actresses than black ones, so it's likely that the hardest working one is white.
Because the OP claimed that Disney was doing it because she's the best person to fit the role, which implies "not greed, except by coincidence".
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What evidence is there that this is the case in this situation, what if they simply thought a black actor was the best fit for the part?
What evidence is there that they thought a black actor was the best fit for the part?
What does “best fit” even mean in this context? Most faithful depiction of the original character? (Clearly not.) Most likely to win an Oscar? (Considering their progressively racist policies, probably yes.) Most likely to appeal to the fans of the original movie? (Probably not.) Most likely to gain media attention? (Probably yes.)
There's not really any evidence either way. So I will default to 'they chose them for normal acting reasons' not that they chose her as a diversity hire.
The actor they thought would do the best job representing the character that they wanted to depict. Presumably whether they were white or black was neither here nor here in terms what they envisioned for the character.
Why should perfect physical representation of the character described necessarily be a goal? Why not cast a black actor if you thought they were the best, was race ever a factor in the original fairytale?
Race was a factor in so far that in the vaguely-defined epoch in which the fairytale is set, Danish princes didn't commonly marry black women, so a black Ariel would be out of place for reasons unrelated to the original fairy tale.
But why stop at race? Is age or sex a factor in the original fairytale? Let's make Ariel an old man played by Robert de Niro; he's a great actor, arguably objectively better than Halle Bailey, and if you oppose the idea of a young Danish prince falling in love with an older man, you're an ageist homophobe. So you'd be okay with swapping Halle Bailey with Robert de Niro, right? Or if not, why not?
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As an aside: a couple of the comments here about the fact that "actor" is a job where belonging to a certain race (or more broadly just how one looks) is sometimes itself a qualification reminded me of a Freakonomics podcast episode I'd heard probably 5+ years ago which mentioned that "restaurant server" is also one of those jobs. Specifically for restaurants of ethnic cuisine, where the servers are expected to look like people from the region where the food is from.
Before I'd ever heard the episode, I had certainly noticed that Chinese/Korean/Japanese restaurants I'd gone to tended to have servers who were Asian. I'd always chalked it up to the restaurant owners often being from the food's region and hiring family and friends as servers, but I had also noticed more than a few times that servers' actual heritage didn't match up (e.g. Vietnamese server at a Korean restaurant - something many/most American customers wouldn't notice without purposely looking for it). From what I remember from the podcast episode, it just seemed like an industry-wide thing, that the server vaguely looking to a typical customer like they come from the food's region was an important factor when hiring them. It seems to be one of those carve-outs to the principle of non-racial-discrimination-in-hiring-practices that gets talked about even less than acting.
It's the same in Germany. Most people want Thai, Chinese and especially Japanese cuisine (though many restaurants ditch the pretense, call themselves generic Asian and just sell whatever people expect as generic Asian food), but most of our working-class Southeastasians are actually Vietnamese, so Vietnamese chefs and servers you get. Most people don't care and/or don't notice, though.
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Probably because those jobs aren't particularly coveted
That's a great point and in retrospect so obvious that I'm surprised it didn't occur to me before.
This sort of ties back into the original topic about principles. One thing that has seemed obvious to me for a while is that, given everything we know about psychology and the science of self-serving biases, if someone actually wants to be principled, they must meaningfully question their own principles with the presumption that the reason they adopted those principles is because doing so is beneficial to themselves, not because those principles are actually the good/right/just principles. Without doing so, they're merely someone who has naked self-interest as their principle and are really good at hiding that from themselves.
Given that, someone who really cares about being principled would fight for their principles in cases that offer them little benefit with just as much (actually, even more, given what we know about biases in perception) vigor as in cases that offer them a lot of benefit, and likewise in cases where following those principles would harm them. It's only by taking a costly action by focusing on things that would be of little personal benefit at the cost of things that would be of great personal benefit or by outright calling for something that would harm oneself that one can actually prove to oneself that one believes in those principles rather than adopting them out of convenience.
Having observed the culture wars over the past decade or so, I must admit that my estimation for how principled people tend to be has dropped considerably.
Yes! This is right on. Old Man Waterfall from Futurama nailed this: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ay1MGWeWLtA
Bonus: they even predicted the fall of the ACLU!
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Being black doesn't affect your ability to input data into spreadsheets or reticulate widgets. It does affect your ability to be Ariel because Ariel is not black.
I don't think her race was ever an important part of the character. Adaptions aren't always, indeed very rarely are, intended to be 1:1 directly translating every that was described in the source material onto the screen. They aren't real characters; they don't have any 'actual' race.
Indeed, in the excellent TV adaption of Jeeves and Wooster with Fry and Laurie, actors of some characters change between seasons, and obviously look different, but it hardly matters. The Roderick Glossop we encounter initially looks completely different to the one in series 3 and 4, and neither of them are necessarily that close to the description given by P.G. Wodehouse, but I somehow doubt anyone would feel it reasonable to shout Roderick Glossop is bald at their TV screen.
It wasn't, until it suddenly was.
As ever, the stock response to "if race doesn't matter, why not make the character black?" is "if race doesn't matter, why make the character black?"
I don't think there's evidence that there was a decision that 'we must have a black Ariel', it's merely that the role was casted without reference to race and the best actor happened to be black.
I don't think we have any evidence for that. The best actor would be one that looks like the character, by definition.
Not 'by definition' at all. As I said in the original comment, that would only be the case if you intended your film to be that way. Which would be fine, but there's nothing wrong with saying 'the race of Ariel is wholly irrelevant to the story, and therefore I will cast without reference to it'.
Look at it this way; to take one random example, they almost certainly could have found an actor to play Noodles in Once Upon a Time in America who looked more like Harry Grey than Robert De Niro. Does that mean De Niro was in some way the 'wrong' choice? Of course not, that would be a ridiculous thing to say, and it's ridiculous in this case as well. Insert other examples.
If you are intending to portray character X from book Y, the best actor is the one who most closely matches the physical traits of character X as described in book Y. Otherwise, you are not casting for character X, you are casting for an entirely different character that you've basically made up on the spot.
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It used to be "doctors and college professors are not women". You're just asserting boundaries for a category without arguing why they should be there. But my argument is that this is the wrong level at which to have the debate in the first place.
Ariel isn't a category, she's a concrete character with defined traits.
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Let's have a look at the proposed cast:
Halle Bailey as Ariel, a mermaid princess and King Triton's youngest daughter who is fascinated with the human world: Black, the bone of contention here
Jonah Hauer-King as Eric, a human prince whom Ariel falls in love with after saving him from drowning, after which he becomes determined to find and marry Ariel: White (British with maternal Jewish ancestry)
Melissa McCarthy as Ursula, a treacherous sea witch whom Ariel makes a deal with to become a human, which is secretly part of Ursula's plan to conquer Atlantica: White (American of Irish descent)
Javier Bardem as King Triton, Ariel's overprotective father and the King of Atlantica, who is prejudiced against humans: White (Spanish) (No, not Hispanic, born in Spain)
Noma Dumezweni as Queen Selina, a new character for the film: Black (British-South African)
Art Malik as Grimsby, Eric's loyal butler and confidant, who sees to it that Eric finds the right girl to marry: Pakistani (British)
Lorena Andrea as Perla, a new character for the film: Hispanic (British of Spanish and Colombian parentage)
Kajsa Mohammar as Karina, a new character for the film: White (Swedish)
So if King Triton and Queen Selina are Ariel's parents, that means Spanish and Black African parents of Black African-American daughter who falls in love with a white prince, is tricked by a white witch, and interacts with Asian, white and Hispanic characters. Very diverse. The main objections, so far as I see, are that the original Ariel is white with red hair, and they've simply swapped actors for the same parts in the same story with the same plot, and crucially have changed nothing else about Ariel but her skin colour - they've kept her as red haired, in the blue costume, and everything else identifiable from the original movie and marketing ever since of the Disney princesses.
Disney are definitely trying to eat their cake and have it: if they had made a new mermaid with a new Black mermaid called Serafina or something and let her fall in love with an Indian or Hispanic or Black prince, changed names, changed the plot a bit, but most crucially changed costuming so that Serafina is a new character of her own, then people wouldn't be fighting over this. But then they would have run the risk of the new property not being as reliably profitable as the old one, which is already established and has a ton of marketing in place. So this is all about the bottom line, not about "hey let's give little Black girls Representation" (not if Representation eats into profitability).
I think we're in violent agreement here: we're both claiming that Disney is doing this for political reasons. I love that you researched the whole cast to make your point, but they're not being cagey about it at all. I think the place that we might disagree is that I claim "Ariel isn't black" and related arguments get too easily sidetracked into questions of artistic license. I think a better argument is "you're making political casting decisions, you're also doing exactly the same racist shit that was the reason people complained in the first place, just with different races, and we know this because you won't stop talking about it".
The pre-planned focus-group-tested battle lines are about artistic merit, and they'd love it if we argue about "who is Ariel, really?" forever. There's a better argument to have, and it's the one that advocates a world where lefty hippy screenwriters are expected to write good literature, black people are allowed to be mermaids, and Disney doesn't get to conscript half the populace to watch a stupid remake of a kid's movie because that's somehow owning the Nazis.
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More the point, Ariel is fictitious.
EDIT: Unsure why the downvotes. My point was that comparing someone's opinion on the casting of fictitious characters to their hiring practices is farcical.
So are unicorns, but we would say that a unicorn with 5 legs and scales is not a unicorn. Vishnu isn't real, but a depiction with 12 snakes for arms and one large eye is probably not Vishnu no matter what you call it. Whether things are real or not has no bearing on anything when it comes to accuracy.
The seaponies and mermares of Seaquestria would like a word.
https://mlp.fandom.com/wiki/Seaponies_and_mermares
But to the point, seaponies and mermares are not considered unicorns.
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Oh come on. 'Kelpie' was already a perfectly cromulent word.
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I look forward to the Icelandic adaptation of Roots.
People often make these snarky comments such as 'what if a white actor played MLK' but it's blindingly obvious that these are not apposite comparisons. Race is obviously integral to Roots, whereas it has no relevance at all to the Little Mermaid. The appropriate comparison would be if you cast a white actor to play a part that was in previous iterations black, but with regard to which race was irrelevant.
Blacks are not uniquely good at getting whipped and following instructions poorly. I'd love to see some race-swapped Roots.
What fatuous remark. Roots is about African slavery; obviously you could make a show about another group of enslaved people set in Ancient Rome or Asia or whatever, but that would just be a different thing. While the characters aren't real, they are intended as a representation of the experience of a group of real people whose race is integral to the story at hand. By contrast, race plays precisely no role in the Little Mermaid.
"Race swapping your fairy tales is okay, but race swapping mine is double plus ungood."
Nah bro, my name is Chinkakinte, and I know kung-fu.
A total mischaracterisation of my position. In general I think 'race-swapping' is fine unless race played an important part in the story etc. So, I'd have absolutely no problem if they cast a white actor to play a role in an ancient African fairy tale or whatever. And conversely, I think it would be silly to cast a black actor to play Lyndon B. Johnson or Harold Macmillan.
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Story of Irish slave sold to Vikings 1000 years ago, and story of modern Icelander who found from his DNA test he is of Irish descent and went to search for his home village in Ireland?
Could be good.
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Japan culturally appropriated it as Vinland Saga.
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Back in the good old days when stuff like race and gender didn't matter, was it just coincidence that things always ended up in one group's favor? Has the game really been changed, or is it a change from unipolarity to multipolarity? If the naysayers didn't protest so much about the black little mermaid, would you consider it non-political? And why should losers of the previous status quo care about your ten commandments? To them, it probably sounds as convincing as a trust fund baby waxing about how his work ethic got him to where he is.
This seems like a claim that could use a little fleshing out. There is an entire universe of context and nuance here.
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That's a lot of cynical questions followed up with a tired class-struggle talking point. I'm not claiming that race and gender didn't used to matter, and in fact I cited how surprised I was when I learned about the Bechdel test. My claim is that we should oppose art being a unipolar or multi-polar game at all, and especially a zero-sum or negative-sum game where one coalition or another uses movies as a pulpit to preach to its choir.
Are you surprised the other side is punching back in a cultural fistfight, or disputing it was ever a fight, or surprised that there hasn't been a detente after the tides started turning?
Japan's first forced cultural exchange with the Americans started with Perry putting on a minstrel show. Hasn't entertainment always served dual purposes?
You seem quite drawn to the conflict-theory view on this. In your view is it just a question of whose boot is on whose skull, forever? Or is there a way for our society to have nice things like literature that isn't insufferably preachy and full of actors chosen for their culture war value?
Does ignoring my questions by accusing me of cynicism make you the mistake theorist? Forget I asked, I thought you were interested in honing your thesis.
Were your questions sincere? What are your answers to your questions?
I suppose I dispute that it was ever a fight, in the sense that original Little Mermaid wasn't as racially/politically motivated as the current release. That is, I think there was a default-white assumption that people didn't think about much, plus it was a European tale, whereas now there's explicit racial programming. In the era when I was telling others about the Bechdel test, I hoped that we would stop excluding women and minorities and start getting more variety in movies. And I think we got some of that: to stick with Disney, I think Moana and Mulan and Encanto were all pretty great. Encanto is interesting because it's the most recent, and it feels tryhard in ways that the earlier ones didn't, because now they're explicitly trying to be super race sensitive in ways that are eerily similar to the ways people look down on conservatives for. Whereas with the new Little Mermaid, I strongly suspect they're leaning into the culture war aspects because it drives buzz, and I think we shouldn't reward them for that.
Has entertainment always served dual purposes? Sometimes, I guess? I think I pretty consistently oppose that stuff, though: I don't like that the military trades access to gear for editorial control of movies. Old movies like Sergeant York or It's a Wonderful Life seem like they were pushing viewpoints in the same ways that I dislike in modern woke preachy shows. I do have a couple of super preachy things I like anyway, because I'm specifically into the thing they're preaching: Gandhi and Mendelssohn's Elijah are both in that camp for me.
But most of the literature I consider really great is because it's saying insightful things we don't normally hear elsewhere and that don't map to normal culture war battlefields. Citizen Kane, for example, or Kurt Vonnegut.
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Who wrote the stories, and for whom?
Why are you entitled to their work?
We are all, to some extent, entitled to draw upon the cultural richness of the entire world.
There are caveats, here. If you're drawing on something sacred, or something that has a specific meaning, then part of respecting the culture you're working with can be not diluting that sacredness or meaning by repurposing it for other, more frivolous ends. And in general, especially if you're drawing on people less well known than you, I think there is a moral duty to give credit to the people you are drawing from. Both of these caveats are based on my view of the morality of the situation and you are entitled to reject them if you choose.
There is also the caveat that if the thing you are using is more recent, then it may be subject to copyright or trademark law.
Beyond that, though, I think it's good to use each other's stories. In the specific case of Ariel, I think (a) pretty much everyone is entitled to Hans Christian Andersen's work at this point, and, (b) Disney get to do what they want with their own IP, although I'm unimpressed by the cash-grabbing aspects of their recent spate of live-action remakes.
Disney is, at the very least, legally entitled to the work that they pay people to produce. They may not be morally entitled to do whatever they want with it, however. I, for one, would certainly hope that they would feel some duty to respect their employees' creative work, and would be open to arguments that cash-grabbing remakes fail in this duty.
I do not think that changing a white character to a black one in the course of those remakes is in any way outrageous, however, and it is certainly not more outrageous than the existence of the remake in the first place.
Who gets to decide what's sacred? There are Native Americans who approve of calling a sports team the Redskins or the Braves, and Japanese people who approve of Americans wearing kimonos, yet both those things were opposed because of "cultural appropriation".
I probably wouldn't apply "cultural appropriation" to either of those things. As I understand it, a kimono is not sacred and has no strong restrictions on when it can be worn, and people should go ahead and wear one if they want to. I'm less sanguine about "Redskins" but that's because the term is sometimes considered offensive, not because of appropriation. Different issue entirely.
In Japan, probably yes. But some Asian Americans believe other norms apply in Boston, Massachusetts, the place of their protest.
I do not believe "Braves", the other example, is a slur.
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So where does it stop? Will we get Chinese Ariel, Hispanic Ariel, Indigenous Person Ariel? All those are remakes which could be justified on the basis of Representation.
How about Snow White (isn't the very name problematic?) and Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the Beast? No reason not to have remakes with race-swapped princesses who are already much too white!
"The Princess and the Frog" was already race-swapped, but at least there they swapped all the characters and moved the action to New Orleans and updated it to the 1920s. Do that with "The Little Mermaid" and you take away any reasonable grounds for objection.
I will watch all of those movies with my kid if they're not total flaming pieces of crap on a stick due to studios forgetting how to write good movies because they make more money stoking the culture war. And with how fast AI is moving, there may be a brief period where we can have all of those tailor made to our own ridiculous preferences on demand, just before we're all turned into paperclips. The real question is what the academy will think of Paperclip Ariel.
And if they made more films like "Moana", based on region-appropriate legends and native heroes and heroines, nobody would object. But if you must have black Ariel but you cannot have white Moana, then there is something more than merely 'making stories with the best actors' going on.
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Which group are you thinking of here?
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This is an ahistorical post-war whale-fall consensus idea. U.S. history shows that, outside of times of monopolar ideological hegemony, intolerance of other's ideas and opinions to the point of storming newspaper offices and tarring-and-feathering people is incredibly common.
These two statements have nothing to do with each other.
"Politics" literally means the conflict between differing groups and/or people concerning the organization, conduct, and governance of society. Wherever people disagree about what is right to do, there is politics.
Scott summed it up as:
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Agreed that we're often bad at living our stated principles, but I think we're worse off if we abandon the principles entirely. Hillary Clinton's speech that I linked below is a good example from when the cracks were just starting to show -- she mostly praises free expression, but puts some caveats in there about hate speech and terrorism(tm).
I agree with your first sentence more than the second. A lot of people claim that everything is politics, which is way too broad. Disagreeing about what is right to do is narrower, but still too broad -- a lot of that kind of debate is religious rather than political, for instance. But your first sentence gets it about right, and I stand by my claim that we should confine that conflict so that, for example, debates about gay marriage don't leak into our fast food chains and web browser companies.
Statements do not contain a constant inner meaning that remains well-understood and acknowledged over time. Moreover, principles necessarily mutate over time, as conditions and times change. Of course, it's very easy to get things wrong when updating principles . . . but that doesn't mean nothing ever changes or can ever change.
Too broad for what? Too broad to describe the category you're referring to? I'm confused.
What makes you think that religious debates and institutions are not political? I would recommend reading up on the history of sectarian disputes in Islam, or of early-church or medieval church councils. More recently, why wouldn't you think that Vatican II, which modernized catholic liturgy, was not political or influenced by cultural politics?
How do you propose to do this? What happens when two people both (a) believe that they are correct about, e.g. gay marriage, and (b) have diametrically opposing views? How do you propose they live with that dissonance, especially where the belief forms a core part of their chosen identity?
Too broad of a definition of "political". If we define it such that everything is political, then the word no longer conveys any meaning.
I picked fast food specifically because it's something that is overtly political now (rainbow-washing from most chains, conservatives going to Chik-Fil-A and progressives avoiding it) that wasn't before. Gay marriage has very little to do with hamburgers and fries, and is not a thing that should have to factor into your decisions about where to eat. ESPECIALLY if you're part of a socially-disfavored group.
Motte: everything is in some way connected to politics
Bailey: it's fine for me to wage the culture war in any context
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Physical appearance and "fitting the role" is relevant to acting, but not to random jobs.
Depending on the intentions of the filmmaker, I don't think 'fitting the role' always has to mean an attempted 1:1 representation of the physical description found in the source material. Sure, if the director/whatever wanted to cast a white actor with red hair etc. in order to faithfully fit the original description that's fine and a legitimate choice, but that doesn't mean every filmmaker has to operate that way. Film and TV adaptions deviate from the physical descriptions found in source material all the time, but there only seems to be major outrage when it's race that's changed.
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Sure, but my claim is that the actual controversy isn't at this level.
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Frankly I find this perspective bizarre. I think adherence to principles that cause one to do good is good and consistency to principles that cause one to do evil is evil. I would rather someone with evil principles be inconsistently evil (and thereby inconsistently good) than be consistently evil.
Frankly I find this perspective... well, not bizarre, but pure hubris. It has an underlying assumption that one can reliably distinguish between principles (or more specifically actions) that are good versus ones that are evil. Which is all well and good when dealing with cartoons and their cartoon villains and heroes, but has rather minimal applicability in the real world. However, I do understand that believing that one's own principles are the good ones is a very common - possibly universal - bias, which is why I don't find it bizarre.
Furthermore, leaving aside moral judgments, it ignores the logistical aspects. If I observe someone else consistently following principles that I consider to be evil, then I can conclude that they are following principles that they consider to be good, and someone who follows principles they consider to be good is someone whose behavior I can predict by learning their principles. Someone who follows principles that I consider to be evil but does so randomly is someone whose behavior I can't reliably predict (assuming there isn't some other principle that they're actually following I can learn about), which makes interacting with them intrinsically unpredictable. Someone who consistently follows principles that I consider evil are people I can learn from and live with, but someone who inconsistently follows principles that I consider evil are wild cards.
This is a great point. Lawful evil vs chaotic evil!
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Brushing your teeth helps you not have terrible dental hygiene. I suppose we might wish that evil people won't brush their teeth and thus be less able to do evil, but tooth brushing is still considered a good thing.
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Those in power that don't believe in the values because they are seen as tools of oppression. It is that those who fight for censorship, engage in virtual struggle sessions in the GitHub issue tracker and defend race-swapping in lazy remakes of our old entertainment are nihilist. They don't value anything anymore. The best description I know of the perpetually offended over at twitter is this quote: "I invented adventures for myself and made up a life, so as at least to live in some way. How many times it has happened to me—well, for instance, to take offence simply on purpose, for nothing; and one knows oneself, of course, that one is offended at nothing; that one is putting it on, but yet one brings oneself at last to the point of being really offended." The problem is that quote is from Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground published in 1864. But the story is that he writes about nihilists and nihilistic mindsets in that book. So somehow it reflects the truth of human nature over a century later that is applicable in the age of Twitter. You are just observing the loss of values in people to the point of they believe nothing matters anymore.
The nature of what we fight against is as important what we are fighting for. We are in the fight against totalitarian values trying to rush in to the vacuum of their campaign of removing the western values with Oikophobia. The best shot is to decentralize like The Motte removing itself from the censorious reddit Silicon Valley hivemind. (Not trying build consesus here I'm just pointing out that the thing that happened with this forum is already is the consesus for the Motte, to leave the censorious reddit.)
Here have an article about the Oikophobia of Herbert Marcuse https://quillette.com/2022/03/02/herbert-marcuse/
I won't speak for @ZorbaTHut, but since there have been some requests for clarification: I don't think your post was out of line (you're expressing your opinions and maybe waging culture war a little bit), but let's be clear here - the purpose of TheMotte is not to "fight for (our) values" (for some value of "our") unless you simply mean "fight for the right to have free and open discussions."
To you, this may look like "fighting against people who want to remove Western values," or more generally, "leftists," but that's not actually TheMotte's mission.
I’m mostly pushing the “rhetorical envelope” to get responses that might enlighten me of my flaws in my views. It seems I found the boundary and be more careful going forward. Didn’t want to edit away after one complaint more try to clarify.
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Well, no. The problem is that more or less every generation, ever, has had incentives to typecast their opponents. "Vacuous materialists" is perhaps the second most popular, after "hidebound reactionaries."
Aristotle, Rhetoric, 2.13
You, Dostoyevsky, and Aristotle all observe a type, then proceed to psychoanalysis. "Why does one notice old men hedging their bets? Oh, it must be due to a life of being deceived." "Why are leftists performatively upset? Surely it must imply a lack of real values." Regardless of the accuracy of your observations, the analysis is on shaky grounds. I'm inclined to give Dostoyevsky some credence; I'd like to see more legwork for your interpretation of modern leftism.
Yeah there are perpetually offended on the other side of the political spectrum that are equally nihilistic. Those nihilist got upset with the Lizzo twerking with a crystal flute they didn't know existed until the video showed up. I only imply leftist in the subsequent paragraphs and not in the first one. Thus the other reply saying that I'm waging a culture war. But I don't believe that it is a single group that is offended because of their lack of values but many groups and of many political persuasions.
You mean that I need to dig up the literary analysis I read that inspired me to read Notes of the Underground? It made the connection of nihilism with offence of something imagined slight almost treated as a game by the perpetrator. I read it so long ago but that quote has stuck with me. Values, created, lack of, and/or passed on from a higher power are a central theme to his works in general.
Sorry, no, I wanted to see a more thorough analysis on why you think those who "engage in virtual struggle sessions in the GitHub issue tracker and defend race-swapping" are nihilistic. It's a little easier to argue that the broader dynamics of social media are hollow.
Dostoevsky did his diligence, to be sure, and I have no qualms with your reading of him.
So the formal proof managment system Coq is going to change its name any day now to use a less sexist name. Oh they have been in a naming committee for over a year now! https://github.com/coq/coq/wiki/Alternative-names
I've witnessed so many of these where a complaint is lodged in the issue tracker over something without more reason that something in the "project" is problematic and not inclusive in some way. It is just simple wording or including a CoC(note the acronym for Code of Conduct) . It is not consistent or helping the project in a meaningful way to be more inclusive.
I witnessed the eton project get piled on for its original name of “coon” without fully explaining to the project author what the problem is, just assuming that the author is American.
How about this a German guy complaining to the Italian about the usage of master/slave internally in the Italian guys project, which is quite popular.
All of these examples take no concern in that there are consequences to the things that they are wanting to change. Because changing stuff other than adding a CoC could possibly break stuff or make a casual user not finding it again.
As for race-swapping a character is in some contexts possibility to break immersion. In a similar way not valuing the consumer of the thing that they want change only thinking of their own sensibilities.
As a French user of proof assistants I'm offended Americans would try to destroy yet more of our cultural achievements over their hangups.
Truly nothing is safe.
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That sounds wrong and likely delusional and stupid, but not nihilistic, at least not without extra steps. According to SocJus ideology, naming something like Coq would cause some people, especially women and people of color, to feel uncomfortable and thus less encouraged to join projects that might use it. Under this framework, changing the name is a way to make the project meaningfully more inclusive.
Also:
I have to wonder how long it will be before Codes of Conduct will have to be renamed for forming an acronym that is similarly harmful to inclusivity according to SocJus ideology.
Well the point why I think it is nihilistic is the fact the name change hasn’t happened in year since the wiki page was authored. Not even the complainer believes the name is important enough to follow up on it.
I see, it seems that I misunderstood you, and your point seems a good one. Could it be that they're principled but lazy? Which, to be fair, is really just another way of saying nihilistic.
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Sweeping generalizations of the outgroup, consensus building.
how is it consesus building? I can modify my comment to clarify...
What outgroup? There is a sweeping generalization but not a specific group you could point to. Or is "those in power" and my description of the many groups of offendacons present on twitter made into a single group?
It’s in the style of waging the culture war, to me.
[People we don’t like] don’t value anything anymore! They’re rushing in to replace the values they destroyed!
We are in the fight against them and their values!
I'll be more mindful with the rhetoric going forward. The move from reddit is a part of the culture war, although might be a skirmish but it is a clash of values. That is a part of my comment of that the move is already done so there is no more fighting remaining of that battle of "values". I'm not calling for any further action from anyone more than knowing that what I view the move away from reddit was.
I see why you would say this, but even with your edits you're still wrong. Your interpretation of why the mods do what they do should not be used as a basis for trying to define what "we fight against" here. One of the major things that "we" want is a diverse group of posters. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another. Don't claim it for anyone.
Edit: In particular, note that your reasoning here implies that the move from reddit means that we now all have values that mean we would fight against people who support "race swapping in .. remakes." Do you not want this to be a place where you can exchange views on equal terms with people who disagree with you on that issue, for example?
Well it is not a perfect argument by me. I’ve replied earlier that this also a slight push of the use language to get responses where I can try move my understanding of the issues forward. If I’m out of line I’ll happily take my punishment.
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Seems people agree more with you then with me so maybe I’m wrong
I'm really glad you commented, because I think you're right. There shouldn't be a specific thing that "we fight against" here, unless it's heat over light and the difficulty of finding places to usefully talk with people you disagree with.
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Go back and watch media from the 2000s, you'll notice it's absolutely full of pot shots at religion. Different culture war, but it was absolutely a thing back then. But now it's your ox being gored/the Overton window has changed and you haven't.
He didn't ask why you think he cares now. And I think that answer is an easy way to dismiss people who talk about principles, but even if he did only discover his principles out of self interest, he wants to commit to them now and he has multiple real world examples of everything he talked about. Does free speech only matter when it's proposed by a being of perfect morality? Pretend I wrote that post.
Nor did I?
I wasn't dismissing that, I was pointing out that his principle of 'keep politics out of movies' or however he formulated it was never really a principle in the first place
(I'm touched by your concern for me and my kine, by my ass was religious back in the early 2000's. Nevertheless, let's pretend I only start to notice wrongs when I'm being wronged). As Fruck points out, this is a strength of principles, not a weakness. Even if I only attach myself to a general principle once my ox is gored, you can hold me to it when it's your turn. But if we presume that nobody means it when they espouse a principle, that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and all we're left with is power struggle.
I just don't think it's a particularly reasonable principle and it never was. Good movies are an art and art is for expressing themes which are sometimes political. It might be more reasonable to ask that politics be kept out of pornography.
Fair! This is something I think is actually worthwhile to discuss. I also sometimes like political themes (Ghandi is one of my favorite movies, for instance). I'm less happy about politics being sprinkled on mermaid movies for kids, in the same way that Rick and Morty gesture at at the end of "Story Train" -- even if the writer has sincere beliefs, sticking them into your work is going to immediately derail it. (Same deal with the Hallmark channel -- there's a market for people who don't mind that kind of thing, but it's really off-putting to everybody else, and isn't likely to produce a lot of literary classics, because it ends up obliterating anything interesting you might have said.)
I suppose there's no accounting for poor production, but then I'm not sure that kids movies we had before the 2010s (or whenever we wanna draw the woke dividing line) were particularly well made. Sure there are outliers, but you've got to remember that most of that stuff is and always will be crap. Find the good ones and show those to your kids. And while you're at it, don't give them unfettered access to streaming platforms.
As for adults who make a habit of engaging online with children's mermaid films, time to put away childish things/etc. And similar story to Show Which Will Not Be Named, if you give it your time, Bigcorp wins.
"When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up." -- C.S. Lewis.
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It occurred to me after I posted that a good collection of bedrock yet underappreciated principles is found right at the top of this thread. I think it was /u/TraceWoodgrains who wrote it originally? Like, where in the censorship/misinformation debate do people ever call for speaking plainly, or the hazards of shaming, consensus building or sweeping generalizations? Yet I don't think we'd be here in this forum today if the mods hadn't been able to point at this as our shared set of principles for years now. Mostly the world has given up on public forums, or is pretending like fact-checkers and public authorities are somehow going to be able to save Facebook and Twitter. But we have an existence proof right here that with a small group of dedicated mods, you can have a forum open to the world where people deal with the hottest of hot button issues without resorting to impositions of draconian ideological conformity. And those pillars up in the banner are what hold it up.
I wrote it.
Mind you, I had help -- most of the wording that you're praising here is either directly borrowed from, or somewhat downstream of, this post from /u/Obsidian and this post from reddit user Bakkot. Which is to say that much of what I was articulating was developed by the original moderators of /r/slatestarcodex, back when the Motte was the Culture War Thread. Their achievement is indeed impressive.
For my part, I've got a long standing interest in discussion norms that includes a couple of blog posts that are relevant to your comments above. My post on pluralist civility grew out of me trying to justify to myself as to why this community is worth engaging with. And my much more recent post on ideological diversity and nonreciprocated virtue is quite relevant to your discussion of the value of having principles -- I approach it from a virtue ethical perspective rather than from the perspective of articulated principles, but it's covering the same sort of ground.
On the whole, I find the virtue ethical perspective on tolerance and civility to be a particularly useful one. I think pretty much all people have speech that they would respond to punitively in one way or another, whether by vociferous denunciation or shaming, or ceasing contact with that person, or stronger varieties of cancellation. You can't actually ask everyone to outlaw all of this on principle without infringing on rights of speech or of freedom to choose who to associate with.
Productive discussion with people whose views are different to yours will always be something of an art. Rules can help, but rules will never be the heart of it. Ultimately, tolerance is not adherence to a simple rule. It's a learned virtue.
From your post on pluralist civility, linked above:
I endorse this unreservedly. Thank you for your contributions.
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"Principles are what let us be predictable agents, able to work with others who aren't part of our tribe and don't share all our values."
There used to be a phenomenon where one would say, I completely disagree with person x, but he really has integrity and sticks to his principles and I respect him for that. That seems rare these days.
However, I have often seen critics of person x claim that person x is a hypocrite who abandoned their principles when a closer inspection reveals that the critic doesn't understand the original principle. (One example, many conservatives canceled their Paypal because it leaked they wanted to steal $2500 per misinformation. In a certain corner of social media I heard critics call conservatives hypocrites for subscribing to "cancel culture." But it merely shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what conservatives dislike about "cancel culture." (Paypal is a corporation not an individual. Also boycotts are much older.))
Yeah, I think you're identifying two bedrock principles there. One is that our political views are separate from our personal integrity. And the other is that accusations of hypocrisy are serious and worth careful examination, not to be casually tossed around or accepted at face value.
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Regarding the second example, it's been widely accepted that actors are an exception to any kind of visual discrimination and that many roles require picking someone who just has the right vibe and look (which includes their race and gender.) When casting a family/clan/isolated society, people usually pick actors who look the most alike.
Imagine that there is a long running series that needs to record a flashback for their main black female lead. If we used the usual standards for hiring, where race and sex don't matter, the series might cast a Asian male. Casting black hobbits in a predominantly white insulated society is as jarring to me as that.
WoT casting would like to have a word with this racist notion.
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Do you have an example of this? It's not that I doubt you, but I'd like to see one regardless.
People don't like politics they don't support encroaching on what they like, but I've never heard of any case where people say that for politics they support. I think the better demand is to demand that movies not preach, not that they be devoid of hostile politics. I don't give a damn if black Ariel is a film that is about black power or whatever, just don't make me think the characters are about to start directly looking into the camera and telling me that black lives matter.
Twitter's official blog in 2011: https://blog.twitter.com/official/en_us/a/2011/the-tweets-must-flow.html
Looking for that, I also ran across this speech by Hillary Clinton in 2011 on internet freedom. Lots of interesting things in there that would sound very out of place today.
https://2009-2017.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2010/01/135519.htm
Here's Eric Schmidt decrying censorship in China in 2011: https://phys.org/news/2013-11-google-boss-freedom-speech-china.html
Not that I love defending Twitter, but a lot has changed since 2011. That was the wild west of the internet and back when people saw the internet as a fun novelty. Social media is wayyyy more than a novelty today - we've seen social media influence elections, enable terror cells to form and communicate, drive people to suicide, and worse. Given that in 2011 they also had a much smaller user base, it's not shocking to me that they would change their tune once we realized the monster that social media has become. There's definitely an argument for how Twitter has approached this, but to argue that social media sites should be a free-for-all isn't realistic at all.
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Do I really need to beat my usual drum again. Is the elephant in the room going to be unaddressed. Okay then...
Remember when governments across the formerly liberal democratic west put their entire populations under home imprisonment? Shut schools, workplaces, international travel, recreation, and places of workship? Brutally attacked even the most mild-mannered of protests? Implemented sophisticated schemes to segregate the population by whether they have taken a series of injections assigned to them by the government? Whipped up hatred of those who disagreed with any of this? Conspired with big tech to censor voiced dissent online, when they didn't just go straight to arresting people for facebook posts instead?
The three things you've listed above are rounding errors compared to this.
Don't imprison the entire population was a principle so fundamental that, at least in the Anglosphere, it dates back to the middle ages with Habeas Corpus. The load-bearing walls for civilization have already been dismantled. Detente in the culture war is over. Liberal democracy has been replaced with "the government makes you wear a seatbelt, so it can do whatever the fuck it wants, and beat the shit out of anyone who disagrees". I don't see a path to putting the walls back up at present, because it's hardly like our current leaders are ever going to admit to committing crimes against humanity and rebuke their past policy as the unthinkable actions they were.
Habeas corpus was suspended during the American Civil War. It was reinstated again once the war was over, and the US did not become a tyrannical dictatorship. Like Covid, it really was a once-in-a-generation emergency, after which things returned to normal.
Covid was not a once in a generation emergency. The exact event was a once in a generation thing, but events of similar severity can happen any time.
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Not to mention the people (in the US) who most loudly complain about needing to have a job to have health insurance then instantly going to bat for the OSHA-enabled vaccine mandate, saying “Look, the government isn’t forcing you to get the vaccine! You’ll only lose your job if you don’t get it!” I gladly got the vaccines and the boosters, and this is still one of the most disgusting things I’ve seen in US culture. I’m never forgetting it, and it really made me skeptical that any of those people care about causes beyond how much they enable their authoritarian personalities.
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Are you completely certain that the government was doing most of the work of locking people down? From my perspective. It all started as a grassroots sort of thing, the most vocal people decided that they wanted to be locked down and didn't want to be exposed to the virus, or expose people they thought didn't want to be exposed. It became very clear, very early on, that any company or government institution that didn't fall in line with this policy would face massive social sanctions, callouts on social media, accusations of violence and racism ("you're literally killing people and people of color are the most vulnerable"), etc from these most vocal proponents of lockdown. That was my perspective from leftist-city USA, that the government and everyone else was just doing what they were pressured to do. I don't know if that's true everywhere, though.
That makes it worse - 50% of the population put the other 50% [adjust numbers as necessary] under home arrest imprisonment...
I agree it was terrible. I don't necessarily think either is worse, but I personally can't stand social shaming used to enforce policies, which is the MO of the left.
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Speaking for my own locale, yes, I am 100% certain that most of the work was done by the government. On March 20, 2020, I was out for a fish fry with friends and literally no one gave a shit about Covid. The restaurant was packed. This was after the United States had implemented international flight restrictions, there were already tens of thousands of confirmed cases in the United States (meaning there were obviously many more) and there was no obvious evidence that anyone cared at all. Nonetheless, by Monday, our governor had issued a stay-at-home order.
I don't think lockdownism was organic at all.
What was the enforcement for the stay at home order? Where I was, I still drove around, took walks outside on roads and in public parks, went to the supermarket, etc. No one was threatening to stop me from doing these things, and I could have easily just gone and gotten together with people if I wanted to, gone to people's houses, met them outside in public places. Idk, maybe I was just lucky and the police never stopped me to give me a ticket for breaking lockdown, but I don't think that was the case. No one seemed worried about such things at all.
I got thrown out of parks, by armed police officers, twice, in Essex County, NJ.
This "lockdown didn't happen" revisionism is tiresome.
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All restaurants and most businesses were fully closed. I am not aware of any that attempted to test legal enforcement
(https://evers.wi.gov/Documents/COVID19/EMO12-SaferAtHome.pdf):
I'm getting incredibly angry as I read back through what these fuckers deigned to be the legitimate purview of government regulation. That I could probably get away with the sin of standing close to someone outside my home because the government doesn't quite the resources to stop me is some small comfort, but on the whole I think @Tophattingson is absolutely correct that Western governments obliterated the normal understanding of the social contract with these sorts of orders.
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This was also my experience.
Edit: in Colorado. I think we were pretty chill about the whole ordeal. I just went about my life normally and I don’t think anything that I did was even ever against any certain new rule. There was a mask mandate I guess and restrictions on the number of people in an establishment, but other than that really not much changed.
We were encouraged to get out and get fresh air, for example. To go to parks, go hiking, things like this. There were never any outdoor mask requirements either.
Colorado very much mandated closure of so-called non-essential businesses which killed more than a few smaller ones. Mostly entertainment type venues since the order carved out basically every job that had any sort of political constituency. For the most part though the Governor left the political liability of lockdowns to county governments. The mayor of Denver initially wanted to shutdown liquor stores but quickly reversed course after panic buying caused some trouble.
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Were where you places that you visited as crowded as before the corona?
If they were, then for at least your locale, you are correct.
If they weren't, however, the question arises why? Is it due to people being afraid of punishment, or due to them independently coming to the same conclusion as the lawmakers.
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Yes.
If I want to visit a friend/business and they don't want me there, then that's fine. You can set whatever standards you want for yourself, and I'll accept them even if I don't agree.
If I want to visit a friend/business and the government threatens to imprison or fine me for it, then it's a lockdown.
Where I was, anyway, (northeastern US) I don't think the government was threatening to imprison for such things. I could be wrong, but I remember it all being advisories, but people were still free to do whatever they wanted. I know Australia and China had intense lockdowns imposed, but how many other places did? Were there any places in the US that took that approach?
I'm in Canada, and the local nonessential business restrictions/closures and gathering limits (as low as zero people allowed) were all enforced by fines in the $1k-$100k range, with most being $2800 for individuals.
A quick google shows similar laws in place in the US.
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I am extremely anti-lockdown but I also don’t see any problem with locking down the population for the right virus.
I think most people have a freedom + utilitarian framework where you pick freedom as much as possible.
I think prior drug wars were a failure but I think fentanyl might just be bad enough for some draconian measures. We probably have 60-70K excess deaths per year right now due to fentanyl and not general deaths of despair.
Fentanyl is a symptom of the drug wars. If people could buy pure oxycodone pills from reputable companies at the drug store no one would be buying counterfeit fentanyl pills from the cartels
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Well the failure mode of this attitude should be obvious (because we lived through it): if you say "no population level mass incarceration EXCEPT for the right virus" then that just incentives neurotic hypochondriac safetyists to hysterically propagandise that a virus barely worse than the common cold IS the right virus.
And then we go back to playing the ol' "Redefine words out from under people" shuffle, where if you lose, you get locked up in isolation for 2 years while the government folks keep on partying (see: Boris Johnson's "Partygate", Obama's birthday garden fetê, etc.)
Johnson was ousted from power because of Partygate, what more could you ask for?
What more could I ask for? In the UK, the maximum penalty for falsely imprisoning someone is 20 years. The government has, collectively, ~210,000,000 counts of false imprisonment to answer for. So the most I could ask for is Boris being imprisoned approximately until the sun explodes.
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It is also worth to note that prior to COVID, the experts went against lockdowns as effective epidemiologic measure. So there was no prior consensus to lock down the whole population for a virus unlike let's say other scenarios such as evacuation due to natural catastrophe or martial law during war. This means that in theory any threat can lead to lockdowns as the consensus can shift in matter of days.
Well, maybe, but I'm cynical enough to believe that this was also "Massage the science until it agrees with the policy we already wanted to do in the first place": namely, economic growth be-all-end-all-ism. The politicos didn't want a hypothetical pandemic interfering with their Line Going Up. It's only in the actual advent of a pandemic that the safetyists came out of the woodwork and demanded the opposite prescription. But in both cases the "scientific consensus" was more a function of political climate than actual data, because the scientists who say what the powers that be want to hear are the ones who get funding / airtime / the ear of the Premier.
Then we should be able to find this woodwork that they came out of. I've looked for it before. It ain't there. There's no segment of the public health community that, prior to 2020, thought imprisoning the entire population of a country in their own homes in the long-term was a suitable response to anything.
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Was it? I think the principle debate here would be over whether it is ever acceptable for the government to restrict movement in the interest of safety. Would you bite the bullet and say that it is never okay, even if doing so would avert a dire outcome?
"Those who would give up essential Liberty".. etc?
I would literally say never and it is worth spending millions if not billions of lives to make sure the answer is never.
This is what we claimed to fight for in all those wars... freedom. If the state sets itself up against the freedom of the citizenry then it has abandoned every charge it ever held, betrayed all our dead, declared itself an enemy of the human race as it seeks to reduce the human to merely an expendable resource of the regime... and unlimited violence is justified to bring about its end as such.
A free person responds to those who'd chain them with violence. A feral animal has this much dignity. one who wouldn't is neither free, is surrendering their personhood, and is barely even an animal anymore, they have accepted being a mere symbiote, a cell, of an alien entity who cares not for them.
Conversely, I've always interpreted coordination around medical emergencies, such as lockdowns, as one of the basic reasons to have a government to begin with.
Covid was not an emergency and protecting us from mentally ill people dragging the rest of society along with their weird agenda, no matter the cost, is one of the core functions of government under the current iteration of the social contract. If the government instead acquiesced to these weirdos then the social contract is violated and the government has forfeited the Mandate of Heaven.
What about hospitals overflowing, not enough ventilators, etc.?
These were fake news items. Hospitals didn’t go over capacity and ventilators were known not to be the best treatment option.
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Maybe in India and Brazil, not AFAIK in the US, certainly not in Europe.
There was always talk of these things as being just around the next corner, happening any minute now, if we do not pull all the stops and do everything now. Same narrative as with climate change. Problems first exaggerated and then extrapolated to justify maximalist demands for whatever measures. Not necessarily because anyone likes the measures, but these things seem to take on dynamics of their own in interactions between public, politics and media.
There was also the argument "people don't understand exponential growth. If it goes to half capacity it could easily go to full capacity tomorrow".
Turns out that people did understand exponential growth.
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Those who proclaim "live free or die" should really decide which one they are, because at this moment most of them are neither dead nor free, not in the "you are only free when you can choose anything, not just anything that conveniently aligned with what the state is fine with you doing" meaning.
Otherwise what is this, a quantum superposition "until observed by the state" or something?
It's posturing or signalling. Useful to rally like-minded people to yourself, but not literally the intended course of action. But your question was rhetorical, wasn't it?
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Oh it's simple, I'm just not going to obey.
I'll do whatever a free man does and if the State obstructs me I'll take any means of circumventing their tyranny up and including destroying the State if that's expedient.
But most of the time, forgery, piracy and contraband are enough. Killing the agents of tyranny is fun to boast about but it's never been a reliable means of securing freedom unless you have overwhelming firepower.
I'm just not going to obey. To the death.
Is that hypothetical or have you actually been doing any of these things?
Nice try feds.
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The ents have become to move, classes that had no interest in politics prior have found themselves forced to participate and they aren't happy about it.
Are you ready to deal with the Amish having a voting bloc?
Yes. Pennsylvania politics can’t really get worse right now.
I'd vote for Patriarch Jeb over Oz or Fettermen. He'd I'd know would be for solar power.
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I for one welcome our new Anabaptist overlords. ;)
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