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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   35785 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

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A world without color under the rainbow

Well, it’s pride month (Grammarly suggests capitalizing Pride here...)! Again. I rolled out of bed last week to a saccharine salvo of big brand bullshit. That, and smug condescension from the women I know on Instagram “wishing homophobes an uncomfortable month”.

When the gay marriage movement really kicked up steam in the early 00’s, I was always a bit perturbed by the use of a rainbow. I’ve always been a fetishist for color - my first attempts at building user interfaces somehow became unusable clown vomit because of it - and so a single group monopolizing literally every hue of light at the same time seemed like a bit much. But I was a good lefty-libertarian and didn’t complain.

I tried to drag this board into a conversation about cars. I won’t make that mistake again, but a point of discussion centered around all of them being way less colorful than they used to be.. If you take a look at a graph you can see that things really started getting “Super Fucking Lame” right about 2007. Don’t worry, the problem’s gotten worse: 78% of all cars sold today are a neutral color.

It wasn’t just vehicles, though. At almost the exact same time, Millennials began making everything grey..

Meanwhile, woke discourse has been (was?) on a tear in mainstream media institutions:

A clear trend of increasing prevalence of prejudice related terms is apparent with words such as racist or sexist increasing in usage between 2010 and 2019 by 638% and 403% in The New York Times or 514% and 141% respectively in The Washington Post.

If you ask a politically correct LLM about why everything is lame, it will suggest that we’re this way because of “economic uncertainty” or social media. Others will say something vague like resale value.

If I know anything about anything, it’s that correlation is causation. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a wave of rainbows and the unrelenting drumbeat of intersectionality has, in many ways, relied on the dilution of color everywhere else. How else can you shove it in the world’s face? A coffee shop already full of colorful whimsy would be burying v99.0 of the LGBTQIA+ flag. It’s only through the clash of it with the drab whites and browns of an espresso machine that a message can be sent. At least the latest revision inoculates itself against good taste pretty well. The clashing racial bars and two spirit circle make it hideous on its own.

The death of peak woke is… probably overestimated. But even my blackpill soul feels some sort of vibe shift. Dare I hope for color to make a comeback?

So recently I was shopping for a new car for my wife. And a surprising number of new to late model BMW 3ers were sold with red leather interiors. That was a truly outre option in 2002, now it's pretty common, maybe 10% of interiors. And there were a few cars we saw that were almost specced how I would have wanted...but that red interior. My father in law would never stop telling me it looked too Puerto Rican.

And in general, that's a pretty accurate rap: in Puerto Rican neighborhoods, houses are brightly colored, stores are brightly colored, more cars are brightly colored, clothes are brightly colored. Hell, I wear a navy blue Yankees cap, most Puerto Ricans around here wear Yankees caps in bright red or orange.

So how much of this is just ethnic distinctions, or ethnic/class based identity formation? I don't paint my house walls bright orange, or buy a car with red leather seats, or paint my business exterior green and blue, because people would make fun of me for looking puerto rican.

I tried to drag this board into a conversation about cars. I won’t make that mistake again, but a point of discussion centered around all of them being way less colorful than they used to be..

I am not sure if this proves what you think it does. If you look at the graph, the difference is basically in people selecting white as their color. I am not sure how it is in the US, but the last time when I was shopping for a new car, the white color was for free while everything else was €500 - 1,000 extra. I don't care enough about color to pay that, although I would prefer more vibrant color - if for nothing else then to be more visible on the road for more safety.

I had the opposite experience on multiple cars. White was a premium, while other colors were free.

Like that previous thread, I know many people don't care about what they drive. How it looks, how it feels, what it does etc. But surely you can see why exterior color would generally represent people's tastes?

I bought a house a few years ago. The previous owners gave it a fresh interior paint job. Very wise for selling a house. BUT, they chose medium-grey paint. It was dark and oppressive. My wife and I had to first thing repaint it light cream. I'm not sure we had to use white primer first to block out that overpowering grey, but we did just to be sure you couldn't see it leaking through like some evil stain.

Weirdly (or, actually...predictably) the last three cars we've owned were the peak popular colors at the time: blue, black, and now dark gray, but we've chosen blue or gray/silver cars forever. Having grown up in a snowy place, I instinctively dislike white cars, because they scream "hard to see against the landscape" and "please deposit mud here."

Fashion is trying to tune people into "dopamine dressing" currently, with fun, bold colors, but people are reacting to actual or perceived economic distress and still choosing Quiet Luxury neutrals; if you can't be rich, as least you can look rich.

Interiors are still in the Magnolia Home modern farmhouse gray and white vice grip, and flipping hasn't helped.

I dislike white cars because they make me think of rolling laundry appliances.

I really, really miss that sparkly midnight green color for cars, personally.

Having grown up in a snowy place, I instinctively dislike white cars, because they scream "hard to see against the landscape" and "please deposit mud here."

Ha!

My city has hit 105F to 110F for 9 out of the last 10 years, yet I still see black cars here, which seem like an insane purchase choice to me.

Millennials weren’t dominating the new car market in 2007. They were in their mid-twenties at the latest. While I didn’t find data for ‘07, over the last decade, the under-35 age group never exceeded 15%. The Flattening started when Boomers and Gen-Xers were buying the majority of new cars.

Same goes for houses. The median house-seller was born in 1960. By 2017, that had crept forward to…1962. It wasn’t the millennials who were choosing beige or grey or whatever.

You know what was wildly popular in the early 2000s? Apple products. Ones that looked like this instead of this. The 90s was blocky and garish, but we were living in the new millennium. We could put chrome and white plastic on things. Monitors and peripherals got thin and sleek. This might be the only time that software looked more skeuomorphic than the hardware on which it ran.

We’re climbing the fashion barber pole faster than ever. Modernism to postmodernism to high modernism to a colorful, psychedelic mess in only half a century. Add another fifty years of nuclear ennui, a pinch of Moore’s law, and stir. The memes of 2014 feel ancient in a way that 60s counterculture cannot, because the latter never really died so much as it was commercialized and co-opted. Well, we got used to that, and now it’s taken for granted that corporations will sell cheap merch representing your preferred minority.

So don’t blame the gays for sending your 70s-ass appliances out of fashion. Give them ten years, or maybe six months, and the barber pole will come back around.

I understand your point on cars, even if I'd argue this generation influenced colors more than buying power might suggest.

But one doesn't have to own a house to influence or consume interior design patterns. The boomer women I know, of course, follow interior design trends, but the moniker "millennial grey" emerged because it was appearing in apartments and social media from said people.

I also agree the cycles appear to be accelerating.

In the UK, the conventional wisdom was that "millenial beige" (which I think is the same colour - I have also seen the style called "greige") was a product of the high-end rental market which exploded after the 2008 crisis and the near-disappearance of 95% LTV mortgages.

If you are a landlord, it is more important to be good enough for whoever shows up on day 1 to get a tenant in quickly. And that means maximally inoffensive.

Millennials began making everything grey..

Painting brick and grey LVP should be illegal.

it will suggest that we’re this way because of “economic uncertainty” or social media. Others will say something vague like resale value.

If I can't afford to repaint something soon if I don't like it, I'm going to take the safer option where I have a higher chance of accepting it, or accepting it over a longer timeframe.

If I can afford to do that more often, I can afford to take a chance at something a bit more... out there. If I don't like it, I trust I can fix it later.

But then why aren’t the more upscale places and homes more colorful? If anything, they’re much more neutral toned than the middle and lower class based places.

My theory is that somehow color got associated with low class or cheap. In order to not look cheap, you do neutrals.

My theory is that somehow color got associated with low class or cheap. In order to not look cheap, you do neutrals.

This holds some water. It may tie back to cleanliness as a symbol of status. You can let a stain or a mark slide a lot more easily when you have brightly colored walls. Once everything's white it has to remain immaculate, and if your nails are done well it's clear you've paid someone else to keep things up.

Look, I made this point in last week’s thread- people yearn for totalisation. LGBT co-opted the rainbow from God’s promise not to destroy the world again, they co-opted sacred heart month, etc, etc, because that’s just what they do.

Everything getting greyer is less to do with gay activists and more to do with society, in general, not loving bright colors everywhere. I blame autism increasing, but it could also just be fashion trends- the generation for whom being able to make everything bright colours was a novelty is still dying.

Everything getting greyer is less to do with gay activists and more to do with society, in general, not loving bright colors everywhere. I blame autism increasing,

This isn't the autistic pattern. My understanding is that we mostly tend toward loving highly-saturated, solid colours (the most notorious example being anime).

the rainbow from God’s promise not to destroy the world again

When dealing with lawful entities such as YHWH, it is always good to read the fine print.

From Genesis 9, NIV:

13 I have set my rainbow in the clouds, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. 14 Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, 15 I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood to destroy all life. (My emphasis, not His.)

One does not need to be a rabbi or lawyer to not that He emphatically does not categorically promise not to destroy all life, just that he will not do so using floods.

And only promised not to destroy all life.

That’s ridiculous. “They” don’t co-opt random Christian aesthetics more than anyone else. Oh no, global warming activists have stolen the flood myth!

I agree that bright colors enjoyed a window of novelty. Along with synthetic fabrics and the rise of computer graphics, they’re responsible for some extremely dated trends. I would add that the fashion trends oscillate way faster, though. They’re at least as fast as the generational pressure of teenage rebellion.

My point was that any identity which can totalise will absorb literally all common symbols, of which the rainbow is one(literally every culture has given it a special meaning- the pagans thought it was a bridge for the gods to access the world, Christians think it’s a sign of God’s mercy, LGBT thinks it’s about diversity of deviant sexualities, South Africans think it’s about multiple races working together in harmony, etc etc), and this is unconnected to general cultural design trends.

the pagans thought it was a bridge for the gods to access the world

Some argue that the Bifrost is referring to the northern lights as opposed to a rainbow

Maybe, but the Greeks also thought this- although in their case it was only used by the messenger.

they co-opted sacred heart month

This feels slightly paranoid. There are only twelve months in the year and whichever one you chose you could be accused of co-opting something. The Sacred Heart month is also a strange choice to try to co-opt as an act of totalisation because it has almost no cultural currency in the Anglosphere except maybe within American Catholic communities; in fact it it's relevance is fast becoming exclusively as a counter-signal.

See my reply to stefferi

Apparently the rainbow was co-opted mostly from the hippies:

"A close friend of Baker's, independent filmmaker Arthur J. Bressan Jr., pressed him to create a new symbol at "the dawn of a new gay consciousness and freedom".[11] According to a profile published in the Bay Area Reporter in 1985, Baker "chose the rainbow motif because of its associations with the hippie movement of the Sixties but he notes that the use of the design dates all the way back to ancient Egypt".[12] People have speculated that Baker was inspired by the Judy Garland song "Over the Rainbow" (Garland being among the first gay icons),[13][14] but when asked, Baker said that it was "more about the Rolling Stones and their song 'She's a Rainbow'".[15] Baker was likely influenced by the "Brotherhood Flag" (with five horizontal stripes to represent different races: red, white, brown, yellow, and black) popular among the world peace movement and hippie movement of the 1960s.[16][17][18][19]"

This seems credible, considering this was somewhat after the Rainbow Family of Living Light had started organizing the still-happening Rainbow Gatherings. I didn't manage to find an explanation of where the hippies took the rainbow from, but the rainbow Peace Flag and the general colorfulness induced by LSD probably play a large influence.

I’m willing to believe it. My point was to draw attention to the totalizing nature of LGBT ideology(down to cradle members and converts) through comparison to Christianity.

My priest always says the Evil One lives at the extremes. I agree that totalization is not the way.

I'll argue (and have long argued) that it's something upstream; the direction of causality is pointing from a common source. There's a pretty wide variety of spheres where millenial-focused media is absolutely bright-colored, especially where designs and decisions come from the grassroots.

There are a lot of things to complain about in Helluva Boss (cw: lots of profanity, some sexual 'humour') or Brand New Animal, but they're not grey or even My Little Pony-pastel. Look at MMORPGs and going from the most conventional subscription model like FFXIV to the most gatcha-like Genshin they've only gotten brighter over the last decade even as they've increasingly targeted the same demographics. The furry fandom overwhelmingly favors bright and high-constrast to the point where there's a term for hitting it too hard and the bar is high (cw: extremely bad bad color selection). Even the artists who do focus on the greys have a lot more soul than corporate metis. Go into Blue Tribe heavy spaces, and the corporate grey laptops are spangled with every sticker cause celebre available.

But if you're putting tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line, you paint your house grey. Nonconfrontational uber alles, in the most literal sense.

There's an optimistic story where the growth of spaces to be maximally yourself have lead to a cleaner division between the personal and the public (well, optimistic until you poke at it), and a pessimistic story where we just banned everything and ignored the consequences.

But I think there's a more cynical one: everything adds up to normal, and this is the local maxima.

Chalky, grey-ish pastels are a neutral 'chameleon' color that reflects and attenuate to whatever you put up against it. This allows for ease of decoration when it comes to styling a room without having to worry about extreme color scheme clashes - most people focus on these colors to allow for re-sell value in their houses.

Fun aside, when my parents had to re-paint their entire house for reasons, I was the one pushing my mother for more vibrant, intense colors as opposed to said chalky, grey pastels. She had developed a bad habit of constantly repainting rooms in a succession of ever-worsening colors.

Except for one room, which she never touched - the kitchen, which was done up in a warm, rich, pumpkin-like orange.

After a long spate of harassment(and more color samples than I will confess to - Lowes should have been giving me a commission, geeze), I finally convinced her to go with the richer, warmer colors, and she no longer repaints rooms.

Color isn't making a comeback any time soon, for the same reason that wallpaper and wall-to-wall carpeting aren't making comebacks any time soon. Millennials are old enough to remember to eerie feeling of walking into a house that hadn't been updated since 1977 that had orange carpeting in one room and yellow wallpaper in another and harvest gold kitchen appliances on top of a fake brick linoleum floor. We're old enough to remember bathrooms with pink tile and no one thinking this was something that needed to be changed. It didn't help that these houses invariably smelled like cat piss and cigarette smoke. When people started tearing this shit out in the 90s, everything seemed so much cleaner, even if the result would still be dated by today's standards. It also didn't help that all of this stuff was deteriorating by the time we saw it, so it didn't have the same look that a recreation or picture in a magazine has today. This isn't to say that nobody uses color, but it's really easy to fuck up if you don't know what you're doing. When I was in college a lot of people convinced their landlords to let them paint and a lot of times they'd pick something really bold that wasn't pleasant to be in for long, and it looked like the color was chosen by a college student.

no one thinking this was something that needed to be changed.

They were better. Abandoning them's just one more sign for how far this godless, corrupted, festering society has rotted.

Millennials are old enough to remember to eerie feeling of walking into a house that hadn't been updated since 1977 that had orange carpeting in one room and yellow wallpaper in another and harvest gold kitchen appliances on top of a fake brick linoleum floor. We're old enough to remember bathrooms with pink tile and no one thinking this was something that needed to be changed.

To add to this: Mrs. FiveHour is a woman of taste. She will happily spend quite a bit of time/money on getting the thing she wants. She would divorce me if I suggested tearing out our home's pink bathroom.

Ten years ago, that wasn't the case. They used to absolutely look dated trash, now they're retro cool.

By contrast, gray was in fashion, and still is, but my dad is redoing the floor at the family beach house. And it's not my place, so I'm not going to be too picky, but the one rule I had was Absolutely No on gray vinyl plank. Because it's everywhere, and right now we all say it's neutral and timeless, but in another five to ten years, we'll see a house with gray floors and it will look like a cheap flip from 2018.

Things go in cycles.

insert Norman Rockwell Meme gray vinyl plank is awesome actually

Won't stain or scratch and easy to clean up any spills or messes no matter what the kiddos throw at it. And if I miss some mess it doesn't immediately show up with flashing lights like it might on something brighter.

Unfortunately, Mannington moved from China to Vietnam or vice versa a few years back and the product went to shit.

I don't dispute the practicality of it, just the way it's going to age.

I've always wanted to be able to refer to a family beach house.

I’m among those fortunate to have such a family property on a beautiful lake in the northeast US. It’s been in my mom’s family for 4 -5 generations, we have pictures of my great grandfather sitting by the dock. It’s a modest place and while it’s worth a lot of money now, it hasn’t really ever been much more than a camp. Our neighbor’s beach house is much fancier, but they just bought it 26 years ago.

As I get older and my own family grows, the thing that I realize is that this is truly priceless. It’s one of the few things in my life that someone infinitely richer than me can’t just buy, and it’s something I am actively working to preserve for future generations.

My wife said when we got married and she started a new job, it felt so fucking good when partners would ask her what she was doing this weekend and she said "oh we're heading to our family's place at the shore" and she could watch people's assumptions about her adjust in real time.

That said, while I enjoy going there, it's almost certainly been a bad choice over time. Unless you're really committed to it, it ends up sitting empty too much to be worth it financially versus just getting a rental. The only real reason to do it is either as a flex, or because in the off-season you want somewhere to hide out and play the shitbird.

My friend from way back had a family beach house--it was right on the beach up from Eugene (somewhere in) Oregon though I don't remember the town--you could see the ocean right out the window, and to get to the sand and the water was a minute's walk down a short sloping hill. The beach was one of those long wide ones where you could splash your feet around, almost like a tidal flat--you'd go for meters until the water ever came as far as even your ankles. Truly beautiful. I stayed there once, two nights; we drank Full Sail bottled beers on the deck, ranged barefoot up and down the stretch of sand, flew kites, ate Mexican omelettes with homemade salsa and drank hot coffee there in the kitchen nook where you could watch the morning waves coming in. What a place.

They had money from a very well-known business owned by I think his grandfather, but something happened and there was a breakdown in relationships, and then everyone began squabbling over that house, and I think it was either sold or just torn down, or both. A terrible waste. My friend was (is) a very laid-back guy and just shrugged it off. Would have hurt me bad.

but something happened and there was a breakdown in relationships, and then everyone began squabbling over that house,

I'm lucky in that my sister and I get along very well, and our intention is that she inherits the beach house for a variety of reasons, with the understanding that I and my immediate descendants will be allowed to use it reasonably often. And frankly the understanding that I'm probably still going to do or contract for a lot of the physical repairs on the house, because that's just kind of a me thing in our relationship. Split ownership nearly always leads to ultimate sale, as relationships become attenuated.

Getting older, I'm realizing two things: my parents made a number of status-oriented purchases that I wouldn't have made and that I consider mistakes, and that despite considering these things clear financial mistakes I have mixed feelings about not holding onto those purchases or continuing them for my children because slipping in status is a tougher thing than not advancing it.

My parents belonged to a country club for 30 years and hated it the whole time, while spending tons of money there for mediocre food. They raised me to hate it, weirdly, in that they constantly told me, when dropping me off at country club kids etiquette events, that they didn't want me to turn into a snob who would only be friends with the country club kids. The push and pull made the whole membership a waste of energy: as a shy and awkward teenager I overcorrected and disdained the preppy country club kids, listened to too much old sXe hardcore punk, and made myself a loner for no reason. I thought that being friends with those kids would force me to adopt everything about them. Giant waste of money.

But there's something about considering losing those status symbols that is worse than not ever having them. I'd never consider buying a beach house, I don't like the beach enough, but I wouldn't want to lose the family place for my kids.

I had a similar relationship with my background and just how WASPy it all is, including a family camp on a lake in the northeast US. Ultimately, “For the kids” is what made me realize it’s less about the snobbery and more the sense of timelessness and continuity of having such a touchstone.

I am reassured to know that I can go to a place that I’ve connected to in different ways and at different times, and it makes me grateful for my ancestors having preserved this for my benefit. Planting a tree for your descendants to sit beneath and all that. Makes me well up.

The place is now in my mom’s cousin’s name, and I have become very concerned about preserving it after they pass.

Grey vinyl plank should have been banned before it ever hit the market. I think it had to do with that farmhouse kitsch thing that was popular a few years back. The thing that pissed me off about the whole trend more than anything else was that, having grown up in a semi-rural area, it looked nothing like any farmhouse I'd ever been in. I'm guessing that the grey is supposed to look like weathered wood? Except wood only looks like that if it's been outside for years, and wood from inside a house doesn't ever look like that. Luckily my house was built in the 1940s and has real hardwood, but if I didn't have it and couldn't afford to put it in, I'd at least pick something that imitates real wood. If it isn't already obvious from the material that it isn't real wood, I'm not going to let the color just give it away.

"Modern farmhouse" is still very much in vogue.

if I didn't have it and couldn't afford to put it in, I'd at least pick something that imitates real wood. If it isn't already obvious from the material that it isn't real wood, I'm not going to let the color just give it away.

Engineered Wood floors look pretty good, and feel pretty good, though I'm skeptical of their durability as they're essentially a very thin veneer of very nicely finished plywood. But they're cheap and you get the ease of installation of snap in flooring.

The hopeful thing is how many big corps are no longer funding parades around the place (even over here). There's been a drop in sponsorship and some griping about it (and of course blaming Trump for anti-DEI). Maybe that indicates that some of the rainbow bullshit will not be as prevalent in future, because it was never about principle, rather what made good sense for PR. Now that it's not as profitable, they're not spending money on it.

some griping about it

My work has an internal chat program. It is like slack. More than a little cheerleading on it for pride recently. Also bitter complaint that major companies are not sufficiently showing their support for pride this year.

I'm used to Rainbow Captalism being a subject of mockery. My coworkers really want it. Or at least a portion do and everyone else remains silent on the issue.

Also bitter complaint that major companies are not sufficiently showing their support for pride this year.

That is the surprising, and to me hopeful, thing. Woke Rainbow Capitalism may have been mocked but now it's not showing up and the lack of funding is being felt.

I'm used to Rainbow Captalism being a subject of mockery. My coworkers really want it.

I believe the complaint about rainbow capitalism is that the companies talked the talk without walking the walk — it was a fifty stalins criticism. Obviously it is even more upsetting to those critics if even the talk is, uh, walked back.

If you take a look at a graph you can see that things really started getting “Super Fucking Lame” right about 2007

That's not what I see. I see it starting in 1997 and peaking around 2012.

I think it depends on where you'd put Silver on the cool vs lame scale, but I'd agree it'd be more correct to say that things hit their Apex.

I think it depends on where you'd put Silver on the cool vs lame scale

It all depends on the car and the silver, right? 2000s M3s and Boxters were just meant to be silver. Chrysler Sebrings and minivans of the same era looked awful in silver.

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