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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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Into the Spider-Verse was my favorite movie of 2018. I only found out this year that one of the film's directors was someone whose values are antithetical to everything I believe and as harmful to me as ideas can be. I knew he wasn't returning to direct the sequel, so I thought that meant I could go see it without feeling shame, but I just found out (again, surprisingly late) that he's an Executive Producer on it. This likely means he gets a share of the box office gross, though I don't know how big that share would be.

This presents an e̶t̶h̶i̶c̶a̶l̶ psychological dilemma that feels as though it's ethical for me. This is one of the few movies where seeing it in the theater is very important to me, and I do feel that I'd be missing out by seeing it on my tiny laptop screen several months after release. However, I would feel emasculated if I gave this person any more money than I already have. Is there a way I can have my cake and eat it too here?

I know it's unlikely that anyone here has a better idea "than stop giving a crap about what filmmakers believe," but I'm asking anyway, just in case. There's nobody else on the internet where I'd expect people to be sympathetic to my problem in a way that's more than superficial. Left-wing spaces (as I've experienced them) would say "you should only care about political violence and life ruination if you're the kind of person we'd be using it against," and right-wing spaces (as I've experienced them) would say "these tactics are actually good and we should use them against left-wingers when we're in power" after making fun of me for liking children's movies. I do not mean to imply all left-dominated or right-dominated spaces are like the ones I describe, but that's my expectation of them based on experience, and it's always demoralizing to get those kinds of reactions, so I don't want to go seek them out.

I struggled with such decisions too. But then I thought about something. I like to eat sweet things. But I know too much of it would be very bad for my health. I like to drink beer. But I know drinking too much of it would be very bad for my health. So I use this knowledge to keep my body in (relatively) healthy state. I am no saint but I think I know what I should be doing there.

Why shouldn't I do the same with my mind? There is a lot of cultural artifacts that have been created over the last 3000 years of human culture that vastly exceed anything that Wokewood has been producing. In fact, if you bother to look a little, there are many recent cultural artifacts that is at par or better with anything Wokewood is producing - still being created. I have no chance of ever consuming even 1% of these riches - and yet I would strive to consume the products from people that openly hate me? Why?

Surely, non-Wokewood culture doesn't have such powerful PR machine behind them, and you may have to spend a bit of effort to look for something that would speak to you - but wouldn't you be willing to spend this effort, if it is good for your intellectual and moral health? Why consume High Fructose Wokeness that is fed to you by the PR machine if you can easily - and probably cheaper too - have access to much healthier and much richer culture?

That said, I get you may sometimes want to consume some bad stuff, just for the heck of it. Happens to everybody. But a tiny laptop screen is not the only option. You can get a TV the size of a wall relatively cheap. You can befriend somebody who has one. There's a lot of options. If you absolutely feel you must see it in the theater - just do it, and donate 2x of that cost to the morally righteous cause. Just don't make a habit of it - everybody does unhealthy things from time to time, making a habit of it is what you need to watch out for.

It's actually rather difficult for me to interpret anything written before the 20th century. I read A Christmas Carol for the first time recently after becoming familiar with the story through its various adaptations, and while it was written less than 200 years ago, I still feel like there's stuff I missed. I do see your point, though, and I appreciate all of the advice in this post. God bless The Motte, or whatever the secular equivalent is.

I don't think there's the "right" reading for the text anyway. Reading is always a sum of what the author puts into it and what the reader takes from it (same of course with listening, viewing art, etc. I just use reading for simplicity). Great works of history survived because the readers over time were able to relate to them - even if they may not have taken exactly the same thing as the author intended. But that is not possible anyway - the only person who can 100% get what the author meant is the author, and even that is not sure (as people change). Of course you would miss some parts. Do you think you don't miss some parts in the modern works too? You surely do. Same would happen with older works. You can fill it in by getting educated on history, culture, circumstances, etc. - but you should not feel discouraged because you won't ever get it all. Nobody gets it all. But I think the process of getting it is by itself great. You can read Dickens once as a clean slate, and then read some history and critique and approach it again and see different parts and then maybe get back to it in 10 years, as a different person, and have different experience. Or maybe you'd hate it and would rather read something else - that's OK too, the thing is there are so many options!