This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Trump just tweeted "He who saves his Country does not violate any Law."
I know that Belisarius thinks I'm a far-leftist (lol), but I think that a fair reading my post history will show that I am what I present myself as, more or less a classical liberal who hates both the left and the right.
I've spent a lot of time and energy both online and offline defending Trump and Trumpism from the often hysterically-phrased accusation that it is fascist, a huge threat, etc. I feel a bit like an idiot now, to be frank. I still hate the woke and am somewhat glad that Trumpism rose up to halt the woke's authoritarian tendencies... but lord, more and more I wish that it had been almost anything other than Trumpism doing it. The argument that Trumpism is fundamentally a classical liberal force is becoming more and more absurd almost by the hour, in my opinion.
Accelerationists (the three or four actual ones for whom it's not just a funny pretense) must be rubbing their hands raw with glee right now. Things are moving very fast.
As much as I appreciate some of what Trumpism is doing to upend stale norms and wokism, at this point I, and probably many other centrists are starting to think "shit, maybe the hysterical libs had a point about these people". And if politics is making me start to side even slightly with literal Redditors, you know that things are bad and crazy.
My biggest mistake, I think, was to extremely overestimate libs and the left. I really thought they would manage to blunt Trumpism's worst impulses and there would be a sort of stalemate like there was during Trump's first term. But libs and the left seem to be missing. Turns out that there is no deep state waiting with sharp fangs and CIA assassins to stop the orange man as soon as he tries to actually do anything that hurts the Blob. Instead, there are only old tired bureaucrats and the occasional protester wearing a pussy hat.
Whoops. Well, so much for that. I was wrong. And this shit is starting to be a bit genuinely alarming. I think I am, actually, getting tired of "winning". I wanted the woke to be defeated by classical liberals, not by a rage-filled vengeful gaggle of right-wing revolutionaries.
And to think that this all happened because Scott platformed Mencius Moldbug back in 2013. Search your feelings. You know it to be true.
I wouldn’t really mind Elon becoming techno-monarch tbh, but I don’t trust Trump with absolute power.
I don't agree with your first sentence. As cliche as it might seem, I am coming around to thinking that it all kicked off with GamerGate, when lots of people started noticing that something was off.
I think pro- and anti-GamerGaters both tend to overestimate its impact. I tend to think GamerGate was just one instance of Toxoplasma of Rage that served as a political awakening for some people. I don't think it was more impactful than other Toxoplasma skirmishes, like New Atheism or BLM.
Though I must admit, GamerGate was also a conflict that almost entirely passed me by. I had one friend in college who I had one conversation about it with, and I was vaguely aware of Anita Sarkeesian, but neither side was salient to me (I play video games from time to time, but I'm not a "gamer", and I've never been an SJW or woke scold) and so I was never very invested in it. It would be like me trying to get involved in the "pro-shipper vs anti-shipper" debate in fan fiction communities. I have my principles, and they might align with one or the other side of that debate more than the other, but I'm also not fighting in that war because it seems dumb and fake to me.
Let me take the neutral ground and say that GamerGate wasn't the precipitating event, but it was pivotal insomuch as videogames were (and still are) a universal hobby of young men. And when confronted with the blunt and obvious truth of Noticing the blue-hairs ruin everything, one could either go down the trail of Noticing everything else or sticking your head in the sand and saying it's a good thing. The 4chan/Resetra divergence, the chud/woke speciation.
It was the universal radicalizing event of the generation, and even those who were normie enough to not care were inculcated with the memes (on both the left and right.) No one questions the cultural impact of music or movies. Video games as a medium are larger than both combined. At some point, video games transitioned from being influenced by political trends to making them. Comparing the financial success of chudgames vs wokegames has become a tribal sport.
Which is to say... if someone plays a piece of media for thousands of hours, having it consume every waking moment of their lives, of course it would effect their political values. New Atheism and BLM are dead and gone but people are still mad that they got rid of Tracer's ass wiggle. I think you're just disconnected with what young men back then and now consider important.
It simply cannot have been, because I was of that generation and I was mostly put off by how much people cared about the whole thing on either side.
If I had to pin a name on what it seemed like from the outside, it was like "Asking Disney Corporation for a handjob." The nature of top tier media (AAA video games, blockbuster movies, etc.) is that only a small number of companies are able to marshal the resources in order to make them, and they can only make a few such releases a year, so if your tastes aren't represented in what they produce, you are left out in the cold. So people complain about the big corporations, and their failure to deliver what they want. Woke feminists want ugly, disabled women in the top tier media, and anti-woke coomers want sexy eye candy. Those desires are mutually exclusive, and so one or the other of them will be disappointed.
Some people have really started to invest in the idea of symbolic victories that can be provided by this or that big corporation kowtowing to their desires, and I'm sure I won't be able to dissuade anyone in that camp. But I really think people need a Diogenes and Alexander moment. When Alexander the Great comes up to your wine tub in the middle of the agora and asks if you want anything, you should be prepared to answer, "Stand a little out of my sun."
Nobody needs Blizzard. Nobody needs EA. Nobody needs Disney, or a thousand other big media corporations.
Either create your own stuff, or engage with enduring cultural artifacts that are 30+ years old, or support the smaller creators who are making things closer to your tastes. Like, the ancient Greeks made commentary after commentary about the Homeric epics and engaged with those stories on a deep level for centuries. But our culture is so temporally parochial, so obsessed with novelty, that we enslave our imaginations to big corporations and lose our souls in the process. Human flourishing is not merely to consoom. And it's certainly not to win pointless little cultural victories in a product you paid $60 on Steam.
Copyright law is at fault for this. Letting individuals monopolize cultural icons neuters our ability to use them as shared myths... And that destroys our society's ability to self-reflect. "Superman" for example is a potent shorthand for a vision of what it means to be american, but only warner bros is formally allowed to use that shorthand to make money which in practice serves as a massive disincentive for artists to portray the same values in the same package and discuss them in a salient way.
And in the end, the only people that benefit are middlemen, not artists. Fanfiction artists getting patreon money is proof that in a world without copyright artists could still make a living, but we only stick doggedly to it because copyright is the means by which corporations rent-seek.
(All the same logic applies to patents, by the way, and in general all ip law except trademarks. Trademarks can stay because impersonating other people or groups is identity theft.)
"Cultural appropriation" is, strangely, an attempt to do this even to things that can't be copyrighted, by people who otherwise can't stop complaining about capitalism.
On the flip side we have no end to Superman expies: Homelander, Omni-Man, The Plutonian, Brightburn. They're just deeply, deeply cynical and aimed at subverting the character. Which may say something about the audience.
In other words: not portraying the same values in the same package. I fail to see how this is anything other than agreeing with the grandparent post.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link