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 -
TERF WARS
Hogwarts legacy, a high budget Harry Potter video game releases in a few weeks, and discussion around it has quickly evolved into another highly charged political issue for many within the gaming sphere.
As background, Harry Potter was created by J.K. Rowling, who in the last number of years has gotten a vitriolic amount of criticism by hard coded members of the blue tribe. Rowling is what is referred to in leftist spheres as a “TERF,” a Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In other words, she is a traditional third wave feminist, but does not acknowledge trans women as being equally legitimate as biological females. Criticism of Rowling began in 2020 when she exposed criticism of certain linguistic tendencies that she had progressively seen engross within her social circles. An article was posted on Devex with the headline…
Rowling took to twitter to attempt to point out some of the inconsistencies in reasoning that she believed these social beliefs couldn’t reconcile with established feminist/progressive worldviews. She began by explaining that ‘people who menstruate,’ used to simply just be called women. And after receiving a bit of criticism herself she extrapolated on the details of her argument.
After the obvious storm of vile that came as a response to this, she then went further in extrapolating her views in an entire blogpost that went into fairly meticulous detail around the entire trans issue as well as major problems that she sees may come as a result of it. I highly encourage you to read it, if not for the argumentative qualities than simply because of the sheer balls of the entire debacle, It wouldn’t be out of place if it was placed on this very culture thread.
https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/
Instead of being silenced or somehow intimidated by threats from these cultural forces, she points out that this is primarily one of the motivators of her immediate dislike of the community in general, including their constant use of hyperbole and slurs. The bitter criticism she received did not in any way overwhelm her, but instead made her far more resolute and ingrained to her worldview. She had become more fervently anti-trans since then, to points which are often hilarious. One may lose sight of the grievances often expressed by the left towards public figures, simply due to the sheer amount of it that is consistently thrown into public discourse. But it is important to point out that J.K. Rowling is a legitimate opponent of transgender ideology. Her most recent books have delved into themes that are consistently similar to the themes she has espoused. One book is literally about a detective trying to solve the case of a male serial killer who dresses up as a women in order to fool and kill biological women. Rowling gives extremely large donations to many charities who are their ideological enemies, as well as essentially banning transgender people from using any of her own charities that help victims of female abuse.
Before delving into the responses to this and the subsequent reactions, it is important to give context to what J.K. Rowling encapsulated during the prime years of her Harry Potter authorship. While harry potter is just popular in general, Blue Tribers LOVE Harry Potter, and at one time they >LOVED J.K. Rowling. Rowling’s influence in the early to mid naughts and 2010s cannot be overstated. In fact in many circumstances and social circles people began to read her novels because of her political affiliations, to support those who seemed to have blue coded interests in mind. Harry Potter had become synonymous with feminism and leftism in general, and as a result also became trumpeted by many in the early transgender movement. It isn’t simply because of her opposition to these ideas that she receives the amount of backlash that she does, but because of who she is. She at one point was one of the most influential feminists in the world and was a huge contributor to the cultural power that allowed it to influence so much of society, even in places like academia.
The responses to this given that context is frankly hilarious. It has been quite a long time since the progressive cultural zeitgeist has had such institutional opponent, particularly one that had for so long been such an icon of their movement. It is like if Luke Skywalker had joined the empire at the end of ESB.
This debate is continually devolving as it nears its release, and discussion about the game has been banned on multiple websites for its divisiveness.
https://www.ign.com/articles/hogwarts-legacy-discussion-banned-from-resetera-forum-site-over-jk-rowling-controversy
It had led to an incredible amount of confusion towards that side of political isle, as regular attacks they are so used to employing, that are usually widely successful, seemingly have no effect on Rowling in the slightest. All they can resort to leading up to the release has been reputation destruction and hostility to those who plan on buying it. The most popular tactic used is guilt by association, who claim that if one buys Hogwarts Legacy, they are therefore inherently transphobic. Another important distinction you may notice is the difficulty many are having with disassociating themselves from what was probably their favorite intellectual property. There seems to be a desire to remove Rowling, but still somehow retain possession of the franchise itself, something that is frankly impossible. Take this for example, where fans removed Rowling’s name from her books before reselling them.
https://nypost.com/2023/01/13/reseller-removes-j-k-rowlings-name-from-harry-potter-books/]
Of course, everyone knows this is impossible. Rowling was wise enough to retain full possession of her intellectual work, and anything, and I mean anything relating to Harry Potter must be directly approved by her and she receives a good sum of the profits as well. Amusement parks, toys, video games, streaming sales, everything. Rowling is Harry Potter. Many now are used to franchises they once enjoyed being influenced in one way or another by these cultural elements in their favor, such as Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of the rings, etc. It is highly ironic that a property is receiving so much backlash not for expressing any pro-red views, but simply because the creator does not agree with one of the fundamental viewpoints that have become synonymous with the left.
On the right, this has had an equally hilarious reaction. While certainly not as fervent or significant of a response, many have taken to supporting Rowling and expressing a desire to purchase Hogwarts Legacy as a form of protest. This includes everyone from Neo-cons to White nationalists.
It seems as if hardcoded Blue Tribe members are learning certain facts about modern cultural society that red tribe members have slowly learned throughout the decade or so. Cancel culture does not work on legitimate financial elites. It does not matter to what ends you try to smear Rowling with, she is and will always remain extravagantly wealthy and beyond any real financial or cultural danger. It is my guess that Hogwarts Legacy will sell extraordinarily well, for it looks to be a genuinely good video game, to the point where even those who are not familiar with Harry Potter may be attracted simply due to its quality. It is already the most pre-ordered game on Steam at the moment has no sign of slowing down. I suppose now that I am not making any particular argument in any way, but It is interesting to see a political force that is usually so successful seemingly work overtime for years on one particular target and see nothing but a proverbial scream into the wind.
I wonder if we could make a comparison to Kanye. They really dropped the hammer on him, he's not even a billionaire anymore after Adidas cancelled their relationship with him. I suppose he was in a more precarious financial position than Rowling though. At any rate, there are degrees of cancellation. There's been a lot of angry words on the internet - I saw one HP fanfic on AO3 post an angry disclaimer about how much they disliked Rowling. But the trans lobby can't bring out the big guns like the Jewish lobby can.
Interestingly enough, there's also been an undercurrent of antisemitism in the Hogwarts Legacy debate. Apparently you help fight a goblin rebellion in the game. Harry Potter goblins have long been associated with Jews. They run the bank at Gringotts and mint the currency, are considered by wizards to be greedy and treacherous and have hooked noses. Plus, there was actually a star of david in one of the films, on the bank floor of Gringotts. They used a real bank for filming, so this might have been an unintentional slip-up.
/images/1674609717974181.webp
and there are degrees to "cancellable comments."
Kanye has received the biggest ban hammer of them all, but he has also made the most egregious racial comments of any celebrity in the recent past. Every time I heard an absurd headline about him, I'd think he had been misquoted. Then I'd go watch the source, and it was every bit as deranged as the headline claimed. Even when around good-faith interviewers like Lex, Kanye pulled out every anti-jew stereotype in rapid-fire fashion. Almost as if to ensure the swiftest cancellation possible. When Alex Jones is the sane one in the room, you know Kanye has gone off on the deep end.
Soon after, Chapelle made some similar points about the over-representation of jews in Hollywood and Jon Stewart pretty much gave the 'go ahead' to Chapelle's statement. Now you might say that it's Jon Stewart in damage control trying to not let this thing Streisand itself. But, Chapelle is still popular as ever and untouched. Criticism of Israel is pretty common place and joking about Jewish stereotypes is pretty much permitted in the industry.
Sure, Kanye was the billionaire that got cancelled. But damn did Kanye do everything possible to get cancelled.
More options
Context Copy link
Then he never really was a billionaire. Theoretical future money you may or may not get from a business deal doesn't actually count.
Well, then most billionaires aren't actual billionaires. The value of of Kanye's stake in Yeezy plummeted absent without his partnership with Adidas (and the fact that no one else would want to fill Adidas's role in the partnership given the stigma around him) . If equity in a company (Kanye's clothing company) doesn't count as wealth then what does? I'm not sure how you would measure wealth, but I that certainly isn't how wealth is normally measured. By your reasoning, there was probably a brief point where Elon Musk was both the richest person in the world and not a billionaire as you define it, given that he didn't, for a decent period of time, have a billion dollars in money outside his stakes in his personal companies.
It seems counterintuitive that a guy who was then richest person ever should yet, according to your unique definition, not be a billionaire. I mean more power to you, but you are using the word in a very strange way.
Note that I didn't say equity in his company. My issue is with the notion that one can be counted as a billionaire when they don't even have the assets yet. In this case, future earnings from his business deal with Adidas that weren't realized. If he isn't a billionaire after that goes up in smoke, then he never was actually a billionaire.
Also... yeah, people do overestimate wealth that is totally ephemeral. I'm not saying that you have to have your wealth all in cash, but I think that there is kind of a minimum threshold of stability here. If I have billions in a diverse variety of investments such that even if I lose one I won't lose them all, that's pretty good. If I have them invested in a single bucket which is pretty stable, that's not as good but still reasonable. If I have billions in an investment that is fairly risky, then I may not deserve to be called a billionaire. If I have billions in dogecoin, then I'm not remotely qualified to be called a billionaire.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's amazing to me how even here, people will just repeat the worst bad-faith criticism ginned up by Rowling's haters.
This is kind of like JRR Tolkien's critics claiming that orcs are meant to be black people or Asians. Rowling's critics found that you can map some goblin traits onto Jews and decided that she did it on purpose because she's an anti-Semite.
Sigh. No, it's not a Star of David. They filmed it at the Australia House in London. It's a star from the Australian flag.
I'm not sure how to articulate why I don't like this kind of reasoning, but I think it's something like this:
Trait X is widely regarded as bad.
People want to portray ethnic group A as bad, so they associate group A with trait X.
A fiction author wants to make fictional group B look bad, so they associate group B with trait X.
It doesn't follow that the author is trying to associate group A with group B.
More options
Context Copy link
At no point did I say Rowling was anti-Semitic, only that her work can be interpreted to be anti-Semitic.
Correct, I slipped up there.
It's clearly a hexagram, two equilateral triangles, which is also a star of David. The early Australian flag had a hexagram on it as well but this was changed in a couple of years to a seven pointed star. At any rate, there is nothing distinctively Australian about hexagrams, it does not symbolize Australia.
Indeed it does; it is a Commonwealth Star, representing the six original states of Australia. The Commonwealth Star now has 7 points but presumably when the Exhibition Hall at Australia House was designed, it had 6.
More options
Context Copy link
Sure it can, but I contend that that is not a good faith interpretation.
I don't know the exact history of the Australia House, but are you claiming they laid down a Jewish Star of David when they built it for some reason? Because I find that a lot less likely than that it was either there for some other decorative purpose, or was based on the earlier Australian flag.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah, I hate this kind of reaching. It's what leads Pathfinder and WotC to replace "race" with "ancestry" and "species."
The ancient Greeks likes to make up tribes of far off people like the amazons, the centaurs, the cynocephali, the Laestrygonians - and while they probably did reflect anxienties and bigotries by the Greeks against people in the world, I think this kind of imagination is an important part of human storytelling. Sure, the real secret of these non-human races is that they're all humans, but emphasizing one aspect or another of humanity.
But they still let us tell interesting stories about broad ideologies. Doctor Who wouldn't be the same without omnicidal Daleks, or assimilationist Cybermen. Those two alien species aren't "really" non-human aliens. Much of sci-fi and fantasy is not trying to do genuinely speculative "what if there was an alien species that differed from humanity in major way X", but instead presenting an allegorical reflection of humanity to criticize some tendency in humanity. It's like Black Mirror - several of the episodes are just our world, but with aspect X taken to some crazy extreme to make the faults of our current system more striking.
It's silly to pretend that the goblins in Harry Potter are or always were anti-Semitic. The best argument you could say on this front is that folkloric goblins might have some atavistic anit-Semitic traits, which Rowling unthinkingly reproduced. That doesn't mean that any story where the goblins rise up against oppressive wizard kind is automatically anti-Semitic.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Based on the degree of the crime committed. JK Rowling is fighting at the front line border of the culture war, and has held rather orthodox progressive views aside from transgenderism. Even in the trasngenderism debate she is using a different branch of progressivism, feminism, to fight it. It would likely be different is she was fighting some already past and adopted progressive tenet. Another difference with Kanye is that he criticized the ethnic group of a large number of elites rather than a group that the elites push.
More options
Context Copy link
Kanye knows that rap careers are short. Old rappers are not going on tour, unlike old rockers. He's looking for some sort of second act: pundit, politician, etc. Being unnecessarily controversial even if it costs him money is part of that.
That is absurd. He was making more money than he ever had before, in the months preceding his cancelation he made up the majority of online sales on Adidas' website. The world was his oyster, he had reached the greatest financial success of his life, surpassed all his peers, and the value of his company was still sky rocketing.
Tour? You do realize that he was now a billionaire designer, yes? Who cares about going on tour? Kanye had one of the most devoted fan bases, and he can and did go on tour, but he now a fashion brand, who happened to rap as a side job. Rhianna, another artist turned billionaire fashion label, hasn't performed in 10 years. It doesn't matter. They don't have to do that kind of stuff any more.
Then he lost billions of dollars in a single week, and if you think that it was part of some 3D chess move and not just bad impulse control then I don't know what to tell you.
More options
Context Copy link
Snoop Dogg (51 years old), Eminem (50 years old), Big Daddy Kane (54 years old), Ice-T* (64 years old), Rakim (54 years old), Krs-One (57 years old), Chuck D (62 years old) and Slick Rick (58 years old) are all touring in 2023.
*As a member of Body Count.
More options
Context Copy link
How much of that is the relative newness of rap, though? Along with the preponderance of solo acts meaning that death/disability to a name means that it can't be Ship of Theseus'd like a lot of bands are at this point.
More options
Context Copy link
He had a second act: fashion. That he fought really, really hard for. He then immolated it and most of his non-rap business links not due to some career plan, but because he's a mentally ill narcissist.
I actually think he's not narcissistic at all, but is surrounded by narcissistic people and he doesn't know how to cope. Like all good creatives and artists, he's doing his best to represent the world as he sees it because he wants to help people but he does it in a way that steps on toes, and he thinks it's ok to step on toes because he thinks he's revealing things that will help people because it's helped him in the past. But he, like many of us at themotte, finds that exposing his reality gets him in hot water, but he's past the point of caring about not stepping on toes of people he sees as the elite, when he thinks it can help empower people who really deserve to be helped.
More plainly: Kanye sees Jews as oppressing poor people in America. He wants to help poor people in America, so he attacks Jews. He's not crazy, he just has a different perspective than everyone else who thinks "I can't attack jews because [fill in the blank.]" He thinks "I need to attack jews because they have the power, they are literally the ones who can keep me from being a billionaire (see what happened) and I'd rather attack people with power than poor hillbillies who wear White Lives Matter t-shirts" (hence his wearing a white lives matter t-shirt and attacking Jews.)
I'm not defending his actions or beliefs but it drives me crazy to see everyone misunderstanding him and thinking he's mentally ill when he's so clearly just working from a different perspective than the vast majority of people, in my opinion.
My opinion on Kanye being a narcissist long predates anything about Jews. Trust me, there's about a decade and a half of weirdo things he's done.
We could put that aside and still have reams of evidence.
People think he's mentally ill because he's literally a person diagnosed with bipolar disorder who's talked about going off his meds, and then does things -like torch a lifetime's work in a totally unproductive way- that make it appear as if he's manic.
No one doubts that he has a different perspective. The issue is how many different ones he has depends on how stable he is on that day.
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