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 -
I was listening to a talk by a couple of Finnish financial speakers earlier this year and one of them said that if you don't include the Big Five tech companies (not sure what the exact definition he was using at that point) then US and EU growth would have been equal, but haven't bothered to check this claim.
At least this got me thinking about how the US continues to reap huge economic benefits precisely from the sort of American cultural domination that underpins a lot of global tech sector success. The online world continues to run on American mores, even local non-American forums and such. That also of course highlights how, say, UK has been unable to recently utilize its own vast cultural capital (not as dominant as American, of course, but UK still punches way above its weights in these matters, globally speaking).
Does the US reap enormous economic benefits from the top end of the stock market ripping? Helps with foreign exchange but even most people involved in those machines are living in areas with absurd cost of living and not really realizing a ton of affluence.
Big Tech now has high but not stupidly high PE ratios (except Tesla) - Apple/Google/Microsoft really are some the most profitable private-sector companies (sorry, Aramco) in history. Both that profit and the expenses (mostly pay and benefits) used to generate it count to US GDP. The fact that almost anyone with a raw IQ above 130 and a willingness to put up with corporate bullshit can learn to code and get a $250k tech job has driven up upper-middle class incomes in the US across the board. And the upper-middle class in California (and other Blue Tribe places which compete with California for mobile talent) pay a fuckton of taxes which secure the loans from the Red Chinese which allow normie-Americans to enjoy a comprehensive welfare state for the old without paying for it.
Software isn't the entirety of why America now has a higher GDP-per-hour-worked than Western Europe, but it is the biggest part of it. My tl;dr for why America won the early 21st century economically would be "America was already dominant in software by 2000, and software ate the world before anyone else could make a serious effort to catch up."
Think of all the sectors hollowed out by competition from Big Tech (most obviously newspapers and B&M retail). In Europe, those sectors have been hollowed out by foreign competition with the same kind of social impact (but on a smaller scale) as the China Shock hollowing out US manufacturing.
...and American dominance in software is downstream, among other things, from the huge national security state investment campaign obviously connected to tech industry right from the start in various ways, as well as general American cultural dominance (Listen to American music, watch American shows, go see American films - obviously you're going to play American games as well, and how much of social media is downstream from already-existing forums culture created in large part by games forums? And that is just one, probably not even the most important, example of building on the existing that I've thought about a lot recently).
One of EU's tragedies is trusting on regulatory state to make up for driving down the elements of you-can-just-do-things state, ie the sort of direct state intervention to bolster business that America has always done in spades while hypocritically preaching laissez faire to the rest of the world. (Of course there has been direct state intervention in the EU and by EU too, but building bridges in Slovakia, while undoubtedly important for Slovaks, is probably less effective in staying globally competitive).
Games is the software sub-sector where the US is least dominant (Nintendo exists, for example), so this isn't the story.
Also, is the American Music industry that disproportionately successful? Especially compared to Britain. For something like movies America clearly is dominant but for music it doesn't feel as clear to me.
Perhaps things have become lopsided since I greatly cut down on listening to new music some time in the early 10s.
Canada has some protectionist policies on media (Canadian content requirements, probably some tax breaks but I don't know specifics) that I believe are generally credited with why they punch above their weight in music and TV production.
The UK has state-sponsored premier TV and radio networks that manage similarly, I think. Less clear on the specifics, but preference for British actors on British projects (the Harry Potter movies, for example) are accepted. I can't say I've heard of an American movie getting grief for casting non-Americans, except maybe in very specific roles. I was (slightly) miffed that Masters of the Air cast an almost exclusively British cast to play American flight crews, but I haven't seen anyone else care.
There was a fuss about black British actors playing characters who were ADOS blacks in American films - but it isn't clear to me if that was an actual thing or if it was just Samuel L Jackson and his sycophants.
Even the Tuskegee airmen portrayed in Masters of the Air were played by British actors. That part felt particularly weird.
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