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 -
This view of suffering, as some sort of negative imposed on life, is bizarre to me. I mean it makes sense coming from a person suffering clinical depression or otherwise deeply disordered. But suffering, by and large, is our biology's way of pointing the way to go. Only children think the world would be better off without suffering. Anyone who has ever seen a news segment or documentary about people literally born without the ability to feel pain understands what a nightmarish body horror that is. I'll never forget the one I saw. Turns out without pain, it's hard to keep an infant from clawing their own eyes out, chewing off their own tongue, fingers and toes, and other acts of senseless self mutilation. They won't cry when they need something, so the new parent, ignorant to the condition, first discovers something is amiss after the child, instead of crying to be fed in the middle of the night, lets their parents sleep peacefully while they remove their own eye with their curious searching fingers.
Suffering may seem pointless to the disordered mind, but every now and again we get a Twilight Zone like glimpse at a world without suffering, and it's a horror almost beyond belief. Like a hell out of Event Horizon or Hellraiser.
It almost seems gnostic: we've been trapped by a terrible demiurge into a prison world of suffering. If only we can deprive ourselves of enough material items (now including honey) in this prison world, we'll finally be able to reach the perfect spiritual realm.
So much of modern leftism has Gnostic parallels, it's unsettling once you know what to look for.
I've never thought about it that way. Do you have other examples that come to mind?
A lot of Marxist false consciousness and its derivatives seems very reminiscent of certain ideas about the demiurge.
The Matrix is obviously a big Gnostic metaphor (the machines have pulled the wool over our eyes and trapped us inside a false reality, we must see the truth and escape into the real world; machines = Demiurge). The Wachowskis later claimed that they'd always intended the film as a metaphor for coming out as trans, which inspired a lot of eyerolls and accusations of revisionism. But I don't think that's the case at all, I really do think that's what they intended at the time of writing:
Everything about trans activism, really, has Gnostic undertones: the very concept of a "gender identity" which is wholly distinct from one's sex is obviously sneaking dualism in by the backdoor, but the way so many trans people talk about being trapped inside these nauseating flesh prisons and their transhumanistic desire to mould, slice and sculpt their bodies to better achieve their embodiment goals carries a big whiff of it too. This is part of a broader trend since the emergence of the internet towards Gibson's "relaxed contempt for the flesh": the tendency to see your body not as "you" but as a tool or vehicle you are controlling. Sometimes this can end up in weird science-denial places: fat acceptance activists who deny that the laws of physics apply to human beings just as much as anything else, that the only thing that can cause disease is mean words and fat shaming. It almost seems to come off like a denial of the existence of an objective external world: instead, we are all just souls trapped inside flesh prisons, and the only way one soul can be harmed is if another soul inflicts harm upon it.
At the extremes, you get into whatever the Zizians were doing, with their outré decision theory ideas about doing whatever it would be optimal for every one of your paraselves to do elsewhere in the multiverse - but they're a noncentral idea of the trend I'm describing.
I'm often startled at how culturally significant the Matrix has been. The sequels weren't all that good, the plot of the original was strange and confusing, and the concept of "the world is revealed to be an illusion" has been done better -- but the concept of the colored pills, bullet time, and Laurence Fishburne's performance as Morpheus just made the movie hard to forget. The strange aesthetic made it both confusing and memorable. (Sometimes I think the flaws of Star Wars did the same -- both the OT and the prequels have diehard fans precisely because they were tacky and disjointed. The sequels are so polished, but they're polished like a turd.)
The Matrix definitely sticks out in my memory, but personally I'd rather everyone take the Christpill from Catholic Morpheus.
A lot of people have pointed to 1999 as being a high-water mark for mainstream American cinema. It's remarkable to think what a widespread influence on Western Anglo culture two concepts from movies released that year had (taking the red pill from The Matrix, "special snowflake" from Fight Club), and how durable their staying power was. A quarter-century after the film's release, you can use the phrase "taking the red pill" in conversation with a group of Anglophones of varying socioeconomic backgrounds and income levels, and reasonably assume that they'll understand the metaphor and that it won't seem dated or clichéd, even if they haven't seen the movie from which it originated. ("Snowflake" will be understood by most audiences, but won't have the desired effect, after years of conservative commentators beating it like a dead horse.) In this regard (that even most people who haven't seen the movie have a passing familiarity with at least one of its key images/concepts), The Matrix is right up there with 1984 in terms of its cultural penetration. The Matrix was a true four-quadrant movie, equally appealing to fans of action movies, sci-fi nerds, philosophy eggheads, undergraduate Buddhists, spiritualists and weeaboos. In today's era of disposable pop culture, where Marvel Studios are delighted if people are still sharing GIFs of their latest capeshit instalment so much as one year after release, that kind of durable cross-demographic cultural staying power is hard to even wrap your head around. Nothing from the current decade of cinema seems likely to equal it: offhand, the only movie from the last decade which might is Joker* (and I think that film's star has well and truly fallen after its disastrous sequel); from the decade before, The Dark Knight.
*I was tempted to say Drive, but I have to remind myself that that film only made a tiny fraction of what The Matrix did: it's universally beloved in the circles in which I move, but not necessarily beyond that.
What was the home video market like in the US? Because, for us, The Matrix was one of the first DVDs we got which gave it even more staying power but we were generally a bit behind the West (especially on TV)
If you can only own a few you pick movies that are either classics, have good special features or really "popped" on screen.
Nowadays you can cycle through terabytes of movies at will (hell, even if you had no internet 6-in-1 DVDs are common in any random street market in Africa) and I don't know that anyone cares about the BTS stuff. You can't sit with a movie for months to years.
In 1999? 2000? Absolutely huge. Things were gearing up for the DVD transition, Disney was getting ready to do their old hat trick where they "take the classics out of the vault," basically every American home had shelves and shelves of tapes or disks, probably in an entertainment center.
It's definitely true that people had to be more selective in movie watching than they do now. But if you didn't have a copy of a movie you wanted to see, you went to Blockbuster and you rented it. Going to Blockbuster on Friday evening to rent a movie was a big tradition.
I do feel like a movie release was a big deal in the late 90s/2000s. Movie tie-ins were everywhere, movies would get websites where you could see trailers or character profiles, children's movies often had websites with games and movie-tie in games were widespread. A movie felt like an event that had ripple effects. I still remember when I was fairly young and Monsters, Inc. came out -- they had a huge website and a hunt-and-seek game where you would walk through the whole scare factory. That was cool enough that it cemented Monsters Inc as one of my favorite Pixar movies even all these years later.
The only times in the past 10 years where movies have felt like that are when The Force Awakens came out, and when Avengers: Endgame came out. But neither have really lasted in the public consciousness the way movies seemed to in the past. It feels a lot like the "extras" that companies used to put in for lots of products have fallen by the wayside. And websites are way less cool than they used to be.
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