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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29292 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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Sterilize any other group to prevent them having children, it’s genocide. Refuse to sterilize trans people, and they call it genocide. …Not because genes won’t be passed on, but because presumably they’ll commit suicide. but the pithy observation stands for a different reason.

Today I learned two new words:

  • memocide: the deliberate and/or systematic elimination of an idea (a memetic unit).

  • memorcide: the elimination of a people’s history or the memory of a people, often a part of ethnic cleansing.

The culture war is a memocidal total war between modernism (the gaining and use of objective knowledge, the rights of individuals, the identification and shunning of bias, and the creation of a unified narrative) and postmodernism (the rejection of objectivity, universalism, and individualism).

The culture war has seen the weaponization of narratives, knowledge, pseudo-knowledge, anti-knowledge, bias, anti-bias, and pseudo-bias. (The latter includes objective observations about statistics which resemble bias.) This is one of the reasons Alex Jones called his show InfoWars.

Should be noted that Finland recently passed trans self-id (limited to adults) and the specific issue that started the whole process was the trans demand to stop requiring sterilization for the legal confirmation of new gender.

Did they at least put in something that'd stop sociopath sex pests from getting self-id and abusing it ? Because they will.

There's a coordinated push to pass these self-ID laws throughout Europe at the moment. None of them have any such safeguards.

Gender identity is absurd but self-ID takes the biscuit. I believe that disabled people exist and are due some rectification from society - mobility impaired people get preferred parking spaces, there is ramp access to buildings.

however all of this is useless to the disabled if anybody could self ID as disabled. Clearly bad actors will identify as disabled if we did this, and take over the assigned spaces.

Everybody would understand what would happen there, so why does a significant proportion of the population not understand what would happen with trans self ID.

The culture war is a memocidal total war between modernism (the gaining and use of objective knowledge, the rights of individuals, the identification and shunning of bias, and the creation of a unified narrative) and postmodernism (the rejection of objectivity, universalism, and individualism).

I can see this argument for say...all of the various group rights being snuck into liberalism (e.g. affirmative action)

I don't see how the trans issue specifically is about the rejection of individualism

If anything, it is individualism run amok, totally unbounded by anything.

The progression seems to be:

  1. You should be free from government tyranny and able to decide your own life.

  2. You should be free from social restrictions when making choices about your life

  3. You should be free even from biology and basic evolutionary inheritances. It is not enough to take what you want, you must be able to choose what you are, and damn society if it stands in your way. And, in fact, society has a responsibility to play into your delusional belief in your infinite malleability.

This seems to me like "toxic individualism" - individualism taken to an insane degree.

I think there's some of both "toxic individualism" and rejection of individualism going on, and I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. As you write, it's easy to see it as individualism run amok, heightening one's own arbitrary choice of identity, unbounded from physical or social reality, as the one standard to force everyone to submit to. At the same time, so much of the political agitating seems to be based around erasing individualism, by grouping all trans people together as one community with shared interests. For instance, trans murder rates are often invoked, which rely heavily on the murder rate of transwoman prostitutes, using it to justify policies for the ostensible benefit of wealthy transmen and transwomen. Or the aggressive grouping of LGBTQ+etc. as one bloc, where everyone in that group, down to the individual person, shares something in common with everyone else in that group for being oppressed sexual minorities in the hegemonic heteropatriarchy.

Forcing individuals to accept outside group cultural norms out of some moral imperative seems very communal, not individualistic. We should note that almost all of the debate about trans issues are their ideological normalization in society. If this were an individualist issue, you would expect one side to be against their very existence. I've never seen a serious proposal to ban them from wearing their preferred clothes, or from taking hormones (with the exception of children) Almost all the debate is over forcing people to take part in their image of themselves.

99% of transgender"ism" is all the things trans people actually do - gender dysphoria, hormones and surgery, dressing and acting and speaking and looking like a girl. 1% of it is "forcing conservatives to use the right pronouns". that may be the part you're objecting to, but that doesn't make transgenderism communal.

gender dysphoria, hormones and surgery, dressing and acting and speaking and looking like a girl

Well, hormones and surgery are required to be subsidized by insurance plans. Where I live it's illegal to perform conversion therapy, which has been interpreted to mean trying to dissuade trans people from being trans. And public schools are conspiring to make teenagers trans against the wishes of their parents, and often without their knowledge.

That's communal, and it's way more than 1%. I don't think you're very honest here.

I'm not sure if I wasn't clear, but that 1% (which definitely extends far beyond just forcing the use of pronouns and includes conforming to all sorts of norma) is basically the whole political disagreement. As I said,

I've never seen a serious proposal to ban them from wearing their preferred clothes, or from taking hormones (with the exception of children)

If this were an individualist issue, you would expect one side to be against their very existence.

Why would I expect that? Or do you mean the anti-individualist side?

Yes, the anti-individualist argument would be against allowing them to take hormones, dress up, etc. I'm not aware of any significant cohort who wants to do that in North America.

Memocide sounds like a word someone made up so they can claim that anyone who corrects their BS is "literally Hitler".

Because from the definition as written, striking geocentrism out of the textbooks is a flavour of genocide.

Is this just about driving trans people to suicide, though? I'm not sure this is the only, or the most important aspect of the argument. Would encouraging desistance in FtM teens, assuming that it does not increase their suicidality (or indeed brings it down in the long run), still kinda count as a genocide? I'd expect that most activists will bite the bullet and say it does. What about a drug or other intervention that'd prevent children from being born trans (assuming this is a thing) – would that be moral, seeing as the condition of transgenderism predicts such a massive hit to quality of life? No, and I believe there's no research being done in this direction precisely because it'd be associated with genocidal intent.

Speaking of genocide and body modification of children... This reminded me that Jews sometimes argue that various things are akin to Holocaust: notably, assimilation – and, more to the point, the ban on male circumcision.

Other senior rabbis also invoked the Holocaust, with Rabbi Barel Lazar, Chief Rabbi of Russia, speaking about threats to shechita (ritual slaughter) and bril milah (male circumcision) saying: “In the Holocaust they killed us by force, through murder, but they understand (now) that it didn’t work… Today they try to murder our souls.”

ADL uses a more diplomatic phrasing:

We recently submitted a letter to the Icelandic parliament in strong opposition to the proposed bill to ban and criminalize circumcision of young boys. We emphasized the central role of circumcision in Judaism and stated that a ban on the practice would unduly restrict religious freedom. We also noted our concern that Iceland would be celebrated by anti-Semitic extremists as a state which is legislating to prevent a Jewish community from existing within its borders.

(Curiously, the counterargument also mirrors the transition debate «Its a human rights violation. Only the consenting adult owner of the genitals may rightly decide»).

The logic is sound enough, if circular: as per the definition of Raphael Lemkin, the word «genocide» is

...intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group.

The annihilation is often assumed to ultimately take physical form, with all those stratagems being mere groundwork – as a case in point, consider Uighur genocide, which atomized Westerners mainly identify with purported fertility suppression and mass sterilization, as opposed to attacks on Uighur culture and ethnoreligious assabiyah. The thing is, Lemkin's definition doesn't work like that! The terminal goal, the annihilation of a group, is not the same as the extermination of its members::

Ethnocide is the destruction of culture while keeping the people. [...] In 1944, in Lemkin’s book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, “genocide” appeared in print for the first time, and “ethnocide” appeared in the footnotes as an equivalent substitute. Lemkin envisioned that genocide and ethnocide would be interchangeable because the targets for this previously undefined murder (cide) and terror were both a people (genos) with a specific culture, nation, and ethnicity (ethnos).

So, Jews are a people, a national/ethnic group. Denying them the practice of infant genital mutilation that they – for reasons other people, me included, may find frivolous or inane – steadfastly assert is crucial for belonging to their group, can be construed as an attack on the group's continued existence, at least within the borders of the polity; thus, genocide. Trans people argue that denying children the body-modifying practice that is crucial for becoming a full-fledged trans person is genocide. The parallel is clear to me. Now the problem is, who are trans people as a group?

They are not an ethnos nor a genos, but a community built around an identity which is downstream of a differentiating trait.

We've heard similar rhetoric with regard to deaf people, bearers of other disabilities (the geneticist Kevin Bird, a disabled person himself, speaks very cogently on the matter of how defining disabilities to be undesirable is a eugenicist framework) – and of course abortion of fetuses with Down's is a genocide too. The whole eugenics-genocide rhetoric is obviously cribbed from racial rhetoric which is, in turn, heavily inspired by reflections on Holocaust after WWII; it's all the same words, and sometimes even the same activists.

We can discuss this as a postmodernist issue, as a memetic process, as a problem of hyperindividualism, but eh... Contra @Tanista, I think this is not toxic individualism but precisely misapplied tribalism, tribalism of people who have only found community through the commonality of their alienation.

In principle, the innate human drive toward tribalist behavior is a potent tool for coordinating collective negotiation in individualist societies, and this is the bulk of what we call politics. In practice, collective identities can hold their bearers hostage and demand investment in their own proliferation; unlike some run-of-the-mill meme like an ideology, this is a very specific mechanic – it cuts to the core of human social instinct, of helping those most similar to yourself (and, the intuition goes, more related) in the competition with alien groups. A trans person who weaponizes the genocide rhetoric is defending not only their own right to exist, but rights of the Trans Tribe as a whole - both its extant members and its historical perpetuation... Which unfortunately has to be outsourced to other tribes on the pesky biological side of things.

If assimilation into American white culture is genocide then the big problem with the idea of “whiteness” is as much the disappearance of ethnic Europeans as it is the oppression of blacks. Which seems absurd.

You mixed quickly on from trans people to ethnic groups, which is a movement from something that doesn’t exist to something that does exist and has existed historically.

Perhaps neologisms would fit these observations? In the vein of “parthenogenesis”:

  • Memogenic: created from memes/the mind

  • Identigenic: created from an identity/similarity - the prefix is literally sameness

  • Laliagenic: created by talking

  • Genogenic or cisgenic: created by genes/created normally

  • Memoethnic, identiethnic, genoethnic, etc.: a people/tribe created suchly

  • Identicide: killing an identity / killing a sameness.

I suspect, were we to start using these, identigenic and genogenic would be the winning memes, along with identicide. Transgender people would be, from a gender essentialist POV, part of a memogenic pseudoethnos. There would be genogenic Jews, identigenic Jews, and pistiethnic Jews (faith-originating) comprising a meta-tribe.

I was sent this tweet which claims that the majority of Republicans voted against an offer to spend billions in border protection. This goes against my understanding of the GOP. Am I missing some context that would explain this?

deleted

He has cancer.

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Mmm, I don’t think you should feel like an ass. Hes trying to elicit the feeling you’re having now. He’s an asshole, not you.

Trying to make @urquan feel like an ass by... having cancer?

What do you want him to do, if he didn't wear the bandana people would be all "who does he think he is, Lex Luthor" and then feel like an ass about that.

This is trivially disproved by there being millions of bald people, and hundreds of bald politicians, who nobody calls "Lex Luthor". Cory Booker looks like a cueball, and people call him a lot of names, but I haven't heard "Lex Luthor". Look here at the collection of shiny noggins and tell me who called them "lex Luthor" ever? https://www.gq.com/gallery/bald-100

Not many politicians wear bandanas though. It is not a very common garment for a politician, so when a politician wears one, it looks weird and its legitimate to ask questions. If you noticed above, Hulk Hogan wears one. He's not a member of Congress (not yet at least). Just as if somebody would wear a bathrobe and slippers or a wedding dress into Congress. There might be a legit reason or just a person fashion choice, but it has little to do with baldness as such or the reason for it.

People who are bald because of chemo wear bandanas, it's a thing. I don't know why it's a thing, but it is.

Wear a hat? Shave his head?

Jamie Raskin is a lifelong grifting rage baiting asshole who continues spreading the insane propaganda lies about Russian spies in the White House.

He also used this opportunity to spread more rage baiting lies, claiming republicans had insisted that he take his bandana off.

This was, of course, a lie: https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-jamie-raskin-cap-chemotherapy-republicans-house-representatives-1778293

So he wears a bandana, nobody cares except to tell him that they hope he pulls through with his cancer, and he uses this as an opportunity to claim that his political opponents are cartoonish villains, and that his bandana is a form of resistance.

Yes, him wanting you to feel like an asshole, and using his bandana to do so, is very literally what he is doing

It's a really common style for cancer patients who've lost their hair from the chemo (I don't know why but it is); are all of the other cancer patients assholes, or are you just using this as an excuse to vent about somebody who's politics you clearly don't like very much?

I'm not disputing that cancer patients wear bandanas. I'm saying that in this specific case he made his wearing of a bandana a political tool, and lied about people to do so.

More comments

I've seen lots of bald politicians. I've never seen one cosplaying Prison Mike.

TBH, about 90% of people there without the bandanas don't either. Unfortunately, most of the clowns there don't dress the part - that at least would be mildly entertaining.

This means the only way to get a border funding bill passed that is acceptable to the majority of Congress is to shoehorn it into an omnibus spending bill.

No it isn't. If there were a border funding bill that is acceptable to the majority of Congress, it could by definition be passed by itself. The trick here Dems do not want border funding. They want to use border funding as a lever to either get Reps to accept a very crappy omnibus bill, or to expose them to criticism of being "obstructionist" - which worked very well on you, as we see. This tactics works, that's why they use it again and again.

Raskin's never particularly straightforward, but I think it's a reference to the FY23 omnibus, which passed the House with only 9 Republican votes. But if so, that's kinda important context to leave out, since the Border funding was a tiny portion of the overall bill.

All around a confusing trick. How are Democrats supposed to feel about Republicans’ supposedly being offered border money on a silver platter?

Contemporaneously? The leftist side complained that Border Patrol/ICE funding was a sign of Biden's political compromise with evil, while the progressive/liberal side framed it as necessary funding for humane asylum processing. Which... uh, in turn reflects a lot of why a lot of Republicans didn't think it was offered honestly.

the budget request gears much of that funding toward “effectively managing irregular migration along the Southwest border”

Someone deserves an award for coining "irregular migration." It can be effortlessly slipped in as a synonym for "illegal immigration" while completely inverting the meaning and intent. Word games really are power's best servant.

It makes sense, though: no human being is illegal, but I have heard plenty of people describe themselves as being "irregular", at least for a while.

Isn't normative used like a pejorative in the spaces that consider "no human being is illegal" a meaningful argument? we're like one step further on the euphemism treadmill from people who think this way being unable to differentiate between people who are legally permitted to be in a country from those who are not. As cliché as it is this is perhaps the closest thing to newspeak I've ever seen, not just brightening up concepts with pleasant euphemism but attempting to obliterate entire concepts via planned semantic drift.

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

I was just reading today the report South Korea submitted to UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and appearantly this offical UN body:

The Committee advised the government to review its legislation and official documents to eliminate the term “illegal immigrants” and avoid its use in the future (Para. 8-d CERD/C/KOR/17-19).

With Paragraph 8-d of CERD/C/KOR/17-19 stating :

Review its legislation and official documents to eliminate the use of the term “illegal immigrants” and avoid its use in the future.

And Paragraph 7 of the same document:

The Committee is further concerned about the use of derogatory terms such as “illegal immigrants” used in official documents to refer to migrants residing in the State party without a valid permit, noting that such terms exacerbate negative perceptions of and discrimination towards these migrants (arts. 2, 4 and 7).

So this crusade against the phrase "illegal immigrants" isn't confined to NGOs and organizations founded with purpose of partisan advocacy.

Orwell wasn't so much prophesising as parodying existing trends in politics.

I also recommend The Politically Incorrect Dictionary (1992) which is dated but hilarious.

"No human being is illegal" as a phrase against "illegal immigration" is a fully general argument against calling any activity illegal.

It's a good argument against the term 'illegal immigrant', I guess, but I'm not sure if "irregular immigrant" is an improvement.

"No human being is illegal" as a phrase against "illegal immigration" is a fully general argument against calling any activity illegal.

Yes, I struggle to think of a public policy debate more intellectually depraved than the debate in the US on illegal immigration, mainly because opposers of restrictions don't want the activity to be illegal but also don't want to make the effort of arguing for looser legal immigration rules.

I think one of the key things here is that the spending bill allocates money not just generically to "border protection" but rather to fund specific things, and some Republicans oppose the things that were being funded. For example:

Congressman Troy Nehls (R-TX-22) homed in on a portion of the bill that prohibits the use of funds set aside for U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) “to acquire, maintain, or extend border security technology and capabilities, except for technology and capabilities to improve Border Patrol processing.”

I suspect Nehls and Raskin differ greatly on what their definition of "border protection" means, which will make finding something they can both agree to very difficult.

I'm guessing it was part of a bill that did a bunch of other things

Let's vote for me giving $1000 to the charity to feed the poor and also you giving me all your money and gifting me your house and your car and all your future earnings. What?! You vote against it?! OK, very well, let me write it down "This person voted against a proposal to give $1000 to feed the poor. Even when the $1000 was given by somebody else! I never thought somebody could hate the poor that much!".

That's how it works. When a politician says "my enemies voted against (doing something that obviously should be done)", he's likely lying to you, and likely by means of omitting what else the actual bill they're talking about contained. These bills are designed like this on purpose - so that when you refuse to go along with the obviously bad part, they would pretend you refused the good part. Do not be deceived.

this implies that the people even voted for such a bill. let's not kid ourselves here: these are all career politicians, they're not paying for anything and as such will vote however it's most politically expedient to do so

They are not paying for anything, but some people may be unwilling to vote for politicians that keep spending money that don't belong to them and that we don't have. Unfortunately, the number of such people is small and is getting smaller all the time.

Unfortunately, the number of such people is small and is getting smaller all the time.

unfortunately indeed

Thank you.

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.

If your politics go in this direction and you want to be PURE, you are just gonna have to not watch any movie worth watching, listen to any music worth listening to, read any fiction worth reading, etc. and so forth.

Creative endeavor has been dominated by people with liberal tendencies since the renaissance at least; and "conservative" art is by definition conservative: retreading existing styles, but worse. That Thomas Kinkade Neoimpressionist Disneyest Nostalginizim garbage.

There are some right leaning artists worth a damn, Dali for example had some SPICY OPINIONS re. politics (even if I don't think blowing up the king could be considered conservative at the time); but they are thin on the ground.

Being openly violent wasn't a "liberal" thing until recently, so far as I know.

Being openly violent is the founding action of the liberal age. The first liberal took their first breath, then picked up a rock and smashed a dukes skull before erecting the guillotine in the champs de mars and gettin' to chopin'

There’s plenty of high quality conservative literature and a smaller amount of high quality conservative film(eg, The Dark Knight Rises), though.

I think LOTR was (and is) conservative art. I don’t think it was in any way intended to be so but it is.

Tolkien was a British conservative. Which isn’t the same, of course, as modern American conservatism.

Go on tinder, make a date to go see it and say you can't find your wallet. Then if you don't feel right saying to yourself "if she wasn't willing to spend $13 on me she isn't the one" and going about your day, act like you had an epiphany as you leave the cinema and remember you hid your wallet under the driver's seat in your car, go get it and pay for drinks by way of apology.

Personally though, I just wouldn't care. I believe I am strong enough to resist any propaganda they push, and not just because if I wasn't I wouldn't be here chatting with you witches. Beyond that though, I can not express how stupid I think it is to actively construct an echo chamber around yourself. Get knowledge from everywhere, from everything and from everyone. Who gives a fuck who said something or why - once you have consumed it you can put it to use for yourself. Only Nixon could go to China doesn't just apply to politics, everyone's brains work differently, and there are all kinds of connections between different ideas and concepts - every piece of art on the planet is built from the thoughts and ideas of its creator, and without his admiration for antifa this guy wouldn't have made your favourite movie. If you have to go conflict theory about it, take what you value and discard the rest.

Not related to the culture war angle, but did the animation not bother you at all? I found it so jerky as to be nauseating. I had to stop watching after five minutes.

Most people didn't have motion sickness or anything like that. I didn't. But I am sorry that you did.

Most of the movie is at a lower framerate than the typical animated feature, but then it speeds up during the action sequences, making them more exciting by comparison. Anime already does this for budgetary reasons (they can't afford non-stop full animation, so they put most of the effort into the action sequences). Spider-Verse is just the first CGI Hollywood pic to do it. I don't know how much money, if any, it saved, but stylistically it was cool. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish recently did the inverse: most of the movie moved like normal, but then the action sequences played with framerates.

The Last Wish was fantastic but that was one touch that didn't work for me. It was at least a fun way to signal that action was coming.

That's really interesting! But did they actually, like, speed up the projectors during certain parts? Or was it all converted to a constant frame rate before distribution, even if the underlying produced frames were at a variable rate? Like a resampling of frame rate so it's all constant, with interpolation to make the lower frame rate portions match.

To be honest, I don't even know how modern day movie projectors work, do they naturally handle variable frame rate, or do they need a constant?

To my knowledge, it was all one constant framerate as literally projected. Animation usually holds drawings/renderings for more than one frame, and when the framerate went up, that just meant that the rendered images weren't being held for as many frams.

Cool, thanks, that makes sense.

This is an excellent post. Thank you for sharing this information with me.

Be a consequentialist. Donate enough money to a cause you care about to morally cancel out the harm you cause by seeing the movie in a theater.

How indulgent.

Is this a comparison of charity offsets to the late-mediaeval Catholic Church's sale of indulgences?

Correct.

Why is a marvel movie important to you? If it is just go, your boycott isn't really doing anything.

What I personally do with matters like this (and what I encourage you to do) is to separate the art from the artist. Good art is worth it even if the artist is an abhorrent person in their life. If you don't want to go that route (which it sounds like maybe you don't), then you don't really have a recourse here. You have to not watch this movie, or betray your principles - there is no other option. Attending a public screening like others have suggested is still indirectly supporting the artist, because he got paid for that screening. I guess you could pirate the movie, but then you're stealing rather than watching a movie made by someone you oppose. Doesn't seem like a trade up, morally speaking.

If you like Spiderman movies, the early 2000s version are somewhat less woke.

They have a whole range of memes in the style of Ben Garrison parodies deemed 'raimiposting' arising due to this one somewhat 'homophobic' scene.

The issue is not so much your money going to your political opponents (you're not really their enemy yet if you're a liberal and they're nazi-hunting), but the damage that they do to you.

The leftist propaganda machine is not hurting for money, the goal is to weaken Western minds.

I don't think that you care that much about the issue.

Even people that are committed to fringe ideologies are not backed to the wall yet, in the West. Getting banned from Twitter or other social media is one thing. Getting jailed for protesting an election is another thing.

But even then I'm not aware of anybody affiliated to the Jan 6 political prisoners committing violence or terrorism, yet.

When things start popping up and you are directly financing woke firing squads or Waco-style bombings, then yes, it will be more of a moral concern.

Now your main concern is wasting precious time that could be better spent figuring out which side you're on, as there will be no liberalism in the future we're heading toward.

and I do feel that I'd be missing out by seeing it on my tiny laptop screen several months after release

Tiny laptop screen I can't help you with, but camrip torrents are typically available within 24 hours of opening day for any major release.

And I know you "inb4"d this, but still, you did correctly identify the fundamental problem, and it would be doing you a disservice to tell you how to treat the symptoms but not also the disease. To reiterate your own knowledge back at you: Stop Consooming Children's Media, it's the only long-term solution.

I could still have this problem with adult media. Are you saying my enjoyment of things like Spider-Verse cripples my emotional development?

FWIW, I did feel instant cringe at your OP juxtaposed with your username. I can't really see making a big deal out of wanting to see superhero movies fit the aesthetics of positive conservatism. Either declaring the movies as low-value culture that's beneath you (despite finding them fun), or just going to see the movie because you think you'll enjoy it no matter what the filmmakers believe would be fine. The problem is maybe less that you enjoy the movie but more that you come off as not knowing any culture you find much higher-value than a superhero movie because going to see the superhero movie seems to present such a major dilemma for you.

Fair enough. I do closer to the soyjak Nintendo Switch Funko Pop archetype than any conservative archetype. I just happen to hold classical liberal principles and a mid-00's sense of humor, both of which put me at odds with the modern left. I mean, Elon Musk is considered right-wing now, man.

Is there any work of art or fiction that it wouldn't be embarrassing for me to be interested in?

Rules of thumb for less embarrassing culture are that it's not quite contemporary (things from 20 years ago are different, things from 50 years ago are different again), while maybe being Lindy enough to have stayed somewhat on the radar until now and not fine-tuned to have 14-year-olds as its core audience. Closer details are very much an illegible signaling game. Good starting point is probably to try to not be stuck in the comfort zone of fiction made to be effortlessly consumed by teenagers and get some sense of perspective with things aimed at adults.

I know it's unlikely that anyone here has a better idea "than stop giving a crap about what filmmakers believe,"

My answer is not to stop giving a crap about what filmmakers believe, though you may think that it's functionally equivalent to that. My answer is that we should be investing in the idea that people are complex, and that we can compartmentalize the things they do in life. I think that proliferating this idea, the idea of compartmentalization, is the most powerful way that we can take down the woke left, antifa, and everyone else who spreads the horrible, harmful, illiberal idea that you can only get along with people who agree with you on everything, and that not agreeing means that they are a terrible person. I understand and sympathize with your viewpoint, and I certainly have felt it strongly at times in the past. But I personally have learned that the notion that we can compartmentalize, and get along with each other, is one of the most important values to me, and is what is missing the most in our modern woke society which generally wants to act on the idea that we should condemn all but the most right-thinking people.

I love this post and am going to reread it whenever I need to remind myself to not judge people by their worst behaviors. Thank you.

His post is "detach the artist from their art" just with more words. The result won't be to disarm "the left" and "the woke"; the result will be "conservatives" just losing more. If conservatives cannot even forgo a movie about nonwhites fighting against their pale, capitalist oppressors, how are they going to affect significant change in the broader cultural norms to understand people are "complex"? They can't even get movie studios to stop producing content made for mass audiences which attacks their beliefs on their face made by people who are open and vocal about hating you and wanting your civilization to burn.

It's a suicidal position. When your opposition makes everything political, you don't win by compartmentalizing, you simply lose. The entire endeavor turns into what to think in order to soothe discomfort around accepting the morally superior loser part in the play.

It's a suicidal position.

Not everything in life comes down to effectiveness. At some point, someone has to be the adult and say "I'm going to treat you well" even if that's tactically unwise. If nobody ever does that, then we just hate each other and try to kill each other forever.

so instead you volunteer to kill yourself

okay, well that's up to you

if avoiding discomfort is the purpose, why not just forget about the whole "conservative" politics things altogether

If you don't understand the difference between giving up entirely and being unwilling to accept certain actions, I don't know what to tell you. Suffice it to say that I don't agree that there's any conflict between "victory is desirable" and "victory isn't worth any possible cost".

"certain actions"

hah, we're talking about going to see a marvel cattleslop movie whose narrative will be about hating "conservatives" and giving money to the creator who is vocal about hating "conservatives"

this isn't a disagreement about being willing to anything vs. nothing, it's about the incredible length of the list of things "conservatives" wouldn't be willing to do and instead choose losing

otherwise, you may be unkind to someone! at that point, why not just give up this whole performative "conservative politics," thing altogether?

that's my point

Just a reminder: the best strategy when dealing with an unconditional cooperatebot is «always defect».

If nobody ever does that, then we just hate each other and try to kill each other forever.

Also wrong: eventually someone wins.

No, that's wrong. Nobody ever wins forever. Your "victory" is really just sowing the seeds of future hatred and violence.

Honestly, it seems to me that conservatives and straight white men have been turning the other cheek for 60+ years now and it's only gotten us into this hell. Maybe time for some stronger tactics?

I never said to just "turn the other cheek". But you have to be careful how you fight back. There are plenty of people here whose only motive at this point is to just hurt the people who hurt them. It would be just as bad if they win the culture war as it would be if the woke left won the culture war. I don't want a tyranny of the left, but that doesn't mean I want a tyranny of the right either.

Less practically, I believe that the one thing that really matters in the end is your character. Not victory or defeat in some culture war, but who you are as a person. It's important to hold on to that above all else. Again, that doesn't mean that you have to just meekly accept everything others may throw your way (unlike how @DaseIndustriesLtd incorrectly characterizes me as a "cooperate bot"), but it does mean that you can't just go "well that's a losing tactic" as a form of dismissal. Better to lose while being moral than to win while being immoral. The latter is quite literally barbaric and is beneath us.

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I don't have any grand plan for how to make the world better, other than to be the change I want to see. I believe the fracturing that comes with non-compartmentalization makes the world worse, makes my life worse, and even makes me worse as a human being, in many ways. I think there are a lot of people out there who are sick of this illiberal way of life they've been coopted into. If we don't start reaching out across the isle to them, showing them there are reasonable people who don't do it that way, they'll feel it's the only way. I do believe and hope that this is just a temporary trend in society, and that the pendulum will swing back.

You don't need a grand plan to solve all the world's ills and your current "grand plan" is cultural suicide; if one cannot even bring themselves to not actively consume the mindvirus which hates them and is working to destroy their civilization, how would they do better ever?

If we don't start reaching out across the isle to them, showing them there are reasonable people who don't do it that way, they'll feel it's the only way.

"start"?

after the last couple decades or so (let alone longer than that), you think the problem is you didn't compromise enough for your opposition to stop hating you, trying to destroy your life, and to burn your civilization down?

you compromise on "civil rights," they ruin your cities and call you racist as you flee to suburbs while pushing explicitly anti-you quotas

you compromise on illegals, they shove more than ever before and in a shorter period of time

you compromise on gays, they move on to transsexuals and your children

the list goes on and on

When will you know when you've "reached out" enough? It's clearly not endorsed state actors convincing children they want to be "gender affirmed." When will you know?

The reason your opposition continues destroying and burning unabated is because they've discovered you're actually harmless.

My answer is that we should be investing in the idea that people are complex, and that we can compartmentalize the things they do in life. I think that proliferating this idea, the idea of compartmentalization, is the most powerful way that we can take down the woke left, antifa, and everyone else who spreads the horrible, harmful, illiberal idea that you can only get along with people who agree with you on everything, and that not agreeing means that they are a terrible person.

It's a self-defeating idea, just like the higher-order idea that propaganda of generic humanism that doesn't rely on superior power is feasible. Why would anyone welcome the spread of this mental infection that directly reduces their fitness?

The left is rational in treating all of economy and culture as a field of political warfare. It's not literally true in all cases, but it helps bring the future in accord with their wishes. @Conservautism shows this Ramsay guy retweeting some clown who calls Andy Ngo a «stochastic terrorist». Does Ramsay accept that libellous label at face value? Who knows; but also who cares: the intent is to suppress the proliferation of Ngo's non-fictional content. Content like this, which undermines Ramsay's own political beliefs and poisons his projects and narratives where fragile, intelligent and egalitarian black boys are suddenly endowed with superpowers to make the world a better place, punching up, saving it from machinations of pale bullies and capitalist oppressors who irresponsibly endanger millions with breakthrough technology. I am not shoehorning anything: this is 100% how the fanatic Ramsay intends his art to work. This is the very heart and soul he pours into it.

In the same vein as demonizing Ngos who immunize people against the political message of your art is rational, boycotting the apparently non-political and subjectively interesting art of Brandon Sanderson (or what have you) to deny a revenue stream which could allow him to support politics (and a family) that you despise is rational too – if you are a mature human being, that is, a predatory Machiavellian ape obsessed with tribal power. All this «entertainment content», attractive moving images and interesting stories and all else, is a pretext to redistribute power, both directly via economy and indirectly via culture; it has no value and no point beyond those ends, and only an excessively neotenic person would take seriously the proposal to «compartmentalize» the hand that dangles a hypnotic medallion in front of his face from the hand that holds a gun to his wife's stomach.

I want to emphasize that Wokes are hyperconscious of small slights and weak links because they are reasonably conscious of longterm outcomes – and their cosmic responsibility before their values and comrades to secure victory. Thus, in a very consequential way, they are as morally (I refer to morale, but morality too) superior to Conservatives – particularly the Spiderman-watching sort – just as early Christians were to effete late pagans with their pointless, wasteful grilling of bulls on lawns of their villas. Here's a case in point. We've discussed Hogwarts:Legacy lately; this guy ended up being mocked by Russian libertarians so I became aware of his existence:

Here's my place in the Hogwarts Legacy credits, the second high budget game I've been credited in. I was the realtime technician on shoot floor helping mocap actors see their rigs in the environments. I will not be purchasing the game - it is the least I can do as an ally.

Trans people do not deserve to have people like JKR grow and prosper - any ammunition to the wrong side is damage to a society I would otherwise wish to see in the future. One where people are not discriminated against for their gender, sexuality, or any piece of their identity

Consider the level of ideological fanaticism (some would uncharitably say «signaling» but I take it at face value) of this guy. Obviously a right-winger with the same attitude would be perceived as a complete freak and a danger to polite society, mocked even here – usually it'd be either a staunch Christian Fundamentalist or some 14/88 Black Sun posting White Nationalist type. Yet I say he's right (leaving aside the absurdity of his beliefs and Rowling's innocence); this asymmetry speaks to cowardice and moral defects of right-wingers rather than some woke insanity. Like Hanania, I lean towards saying that conservatives deserve that's happening to them. If you don't care about politics, politics still cares about you.

I imagine, and to some extent know, that the overwhelming majority of hundreds of thousands of Russians mobilized for war were also proud of just living their lives, taking care of their families like responsible adults. But that's the infantile choice in the world of predatory apes who have weaponized literally everything.

I've watched Spiderverse 1 via Popcorn Time. It was an okay thing to consoom, but the disgusting American racial religion and a host of underclass-glorifying memes were of course already palpable there. Thanks to these updates on Ramsay, I will not be watching the sequel. Entertainment has been artificially made a big part of our lives; the illusion of passing on some positive good is just that, an illusion. Letting a snarl of American brainworms into my head is too high a cost for two hours of watching a well-rendered childish story. If I stooped so low as to actually pay money to spreaders of those worms, I'd have lost all respect for myself. It's indignity enough that I already buy – and have bought in the past – many things that indirectly contribute to the American liberal project.

I'll be listening to some Saltykov-Shchedrin today.

Wait, really? I thought Into the Spider-Verse was, if anything, surprisingly conservative and not reflective of Ramsey's beliefs, but I am pretty obviously not as right-wing as you, so my standards for what's "too left-wing" are gonna be different.

https://www.themotte.org/post/349/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/64050?context=8#context

I just explained it in a different reply, so I'll link to that here.

But I personally have learned that the notion that we can compartmentalize, and get along with each other, is one of the most important values to me

I don't mind being nice to people who ideologically hate me.

It would be wise, however, not to actually finance their arms purchases for the Culture War.

Aside from this and with the Hogwarts Legacy awareness campaign going on, I'm also reminded of two incidents when Chinese censorship collided with American entertainment corporations. The first was the Blitzchung controversy, when Blizzard acted out against a Hearthstone player who talked about the Hong Kong protests during an official stream. The second was when Chinese corporations withdrew their sponsorships for the NBA because the NBA didn't "sufficiently" punish someone in the NBA who tweeted support for the Hong Kong protesters. The NBA chose to accept the withdrawals and stand behind the free speech of the tweet.

Despite one action being pro-China and the other being anti, I think both decisions were correct under the principle that it's good for us to have "sanctuaries". There should be times and spaces where we can consciously ignore conflicts to do something enriching together, as a reminder of common humanity. Even if both sides return to war, even if they have incompatible values, we at least remember the cost of casualties.

Sports have a tradition of being such a sanctuary, and I feel like signal boosting a conflict-heavy cause during these spectator events is a violation of that. Signal boosting outside of the events, outside of the sacred spacetime, falls under the judgement of free speech principles in that context (or your equivalent principle). Public discussion spaces like The Motte pursue a similar sanctuary ideal, and that pursuit is likely more important than the sports sanctuary.

Should art be a sanctuary? I'm not confident enough to say that all "art" is eligible for sanctuary. Editorial cartoons and documentaries are closer to the conflict and are probably part of the culture war battlefield. But identifying art that's eligible for sanctuary is more of an I-know-it-when-I-see-it affair. Is it largely apolitical (distant from the hot points of conflict)? Is it well crafted? Is it heartfelt? Is it self-expression? Is it honest? At some point, yes, consuming, sharing, and discussing that art has the same function of connecting us through human commonalities, even as we're divided by our just as human differences.

Every artist, musician, writer etc. believes things you don't agree with. If you only consume media by people who share all of your opinions, you will not be consuming any media at all.

I find Varg Vikernes's worldview more offensive than that of just about any woke person's, but is that going to stop me listening to his music? No.

I take 0 issue with someone having different opinions and values. They can support abortion, LGBT, BLM, be militant atheists for all I care.

I do however draw the line when they publicly admit that they believe I'm the worst person ever for literally existing, that my race, culture, religion and society are the roots of all evil and oppression and comparable to Nazis. That's when it stops being an opinion, and turns into vile character assassination. My moral worth and that of everyone in my community is in the negatives, apparently. Unless said person is making some kind of a breakthrough in something significant, it would be very hard for me to look drudge past so much drek for some occasional entertainment.

I fully endorse voting with your money with regard to woke art, but if the movie isn’t ideological (which remains to be seen), why do you care about the producer? I don’t know about film crew ranks, but if the best boy (whatever that is) held values antithetical to yours would you be bothered? What about the key grip (again, whatever that is)? Costume designer? Casting director? Keep moving up the chain until it matters. Why is that the point where a worker’s political beliefs ruin the movie for you?

In the old Christian view of the world, everyone was equally evil and equally deserving of damnation, but I think that worldview allowed for greater nuance in weighing people’s moral worth. You either had to bite the bullet and say that no one had any moral worth, or make pretty fine distinctions, along the lines of “OF COURSE we’re all equally bad, but we kill people in battle, and that other guy kills prisoners.” Nowadays, though, without that blanket condemnation of every human, it’s easy to fall into “but that guy is BAD and I don’t want to help him/pay him/give him a platform/etc.”

My brother in Christ, EVERYONE is bad. Your plumber cheats on his wife, your mechanic watches child porn, your hairdresser spreads rumours, your kid tortures frogs. You give them all money without a second thought. It sucks, but it is the fallen nature of humanity. If the movie is a wokefest, skip it no matter what the producer thinks, but if this specific bad executive producer can executively produce a good movie, why the isolated demand for purity?

On another note, yousaid it was an ethical dilemma, but ethical dilemmas involve competing obligations. You have only one obligation- to not support this guy, but mentioned shame and feeing emasculated. That’s not an ethical dilemma, it’s a psychological one. It sounds (sounds, that’s all), like you’re trying to preserve an ideal of who you are as resisting in some measure the decline of western society. A noble goal, but we’re fretting over a spiderman cartoon, so the battle is lost. They’ve gotten into your head, and whether you see the movie or not, you think watching spider man movies is really important, which is a win for Marvel marketing over the long run. Do not resist the decline, propel the recovery. Step one is to stop watching marvel movies and go out and act on the world. . If you already act, act more.

Oh my god, you've made me realize something. Rightists often talk about white privilege as though it's the rhetoric of original sin, but it ISN'T original sin, because original sin implies nobody is absolved, doesn't it? That we are all born racist/sexist/ableist/etc and we shouldn't cast the first stone?

I have limited exposure to religious people so I don't know if they were less harsh towards their enemies when they were in power. I just assumed that they were, and that any ideological faction that gains power becomes like this, because power corrupts people.

Oh, they still cast a lot of stones back in the day. But nowadays there's a much more pernicious sense of self-righteousness that I think comes from the loss of the idea that everyone is evil/fallen.

I thought of your comment when I saw these heartless cretins celebrate somebody's suicide because he walked around holding a torch and said some offensive things.

Just look at it this way, the amount of money he likely gets from you specifically is going to be very small. So even if he does fund domestic terrorism as much as he cheers it on, you would likely not be contributing to it much directly just by seeing the movie in theaters. There is also the fact that you probably fund significantly worse causes and factions with your other luxury/optional purchases already, so giving up something that brings you joy for that reason is kind of silly in my opinion.

Do you have similar reservations about products that include children mining cobalt sonewhere in the supply chain?

You make a good point. This is a totally psychological phenomenon based on the perception that I, personally, am being threatened by Peter Ramsey, whereas I am not a child living in the third world. Looking at it like that, I'm being petty selfish.

Not op, but children mining cobalt are not an existential threat to the west. Concern for them is purely charitable, and while I’d have no objections to a plan to re-colonise Africa, sterilise a good chunk of the adult population and take the kids out of the mines and put them in glorious well fed summer camps; in the current world boycotting mining companies… is pointless.

in the current world boycotting mining companies… is pointless.

And boycotting movies for right-wing causes isn't? You must strongly overestimate the number of people who have the "political will" to actually go through with that compared to me.

I actually agree with you entirely on the implausibility of success via conservative boycotts; I was addressing the implied discrepancy in degrees of concern. 1st, there's the domestic and personal versus foreign angle, then there is a secondary discrepancy in what success looks like. Were boycotts to succeed on the politics front, I think the world would be improved (this almost certainly won't happen). Given the state of much of Africa, I'm not sure boycotts would deliver the goal of improving life quality for the affected people, even if they worked. Those children in the mines, might be better off than in the alternative. Sorry for the lack of clarity.

Right now a lot of leftists are hectoring people for buying or playing Hogwarts Legacy. Do you think they have a legitimate argument, just the wrong target, or do you think they are being silly for demanding ideological and ethical purity in their media consumption?

Realistically, if you are not on the left, most of your media is going to be produced by people who probably hold views you dislike. (Also, realistically, this true for everyone, just moreso for people who aren't leftists.) The only difference here is this guy has been more open and in-your-face about it than most. There are probably lots of people with credits and revenue-sharing on Into the Spider-Verse who are just as left as him or more so.

How much energy do you want to invest in trying not to give money to your political enemies?

How much energy do you want to invest in trying not to give money to your political enemies?

I don't look at these things in this light. I don't think it's about political enemies at all. I think it's more so, don't spent time/energy/money on people who think that you're a problem that needs to be solved. It's not because you're rewarding them/encouraging them/providing them ammo. It's because eventually they're going to pull the rug out from under you.

Actually, neither a lot of leftists nor a lot of transgender people are boycotting Hogwarts Legacy. A small cabal of extremely online transgender activists (is this redundant?) are applying pressure against the game. You might think they failed in their stated goal, but the stated goals of activists are always exaggerated in order to arrive at a better middle ground.

So what did these extremely limited in number activists accomplish? They made “you can support the game and not support Rowling” a popular opinion online, which presupposes the immorality of Rowling, reminding the public of her ill repute. They spooked the game developers, who may have specifically added a transgender character at an important location in the game. The game developers may have also amplified the diversity as a defense against activism against them.

So, for such a small sliver of the population — perhaps 0.1% engaging in anything approximating a boycott — they actually had some influence on popular sentiment.

I disagree. I think by making this their hill to die on and then no one caring they have lost influence on future commercial endeavors the trans movement would disapprove of. Future producers will be a lot less easily frightened by activist underlings when they cannot point to this having tanked the biggest game of the year.

If it surrendered and wasn't tanked, that's not evidence against "failing to surrender gets you tanked".

I understand why people are bothered by JK Rowling's political views, but from my perspective, she is taking action that we consider welcome in a liberal society: speaking her mind and lobbying for politicians/policies she wants. I would be bothered if Peter Ramsey was donating money to people who want to create hate speech laws in the United States, but I wouldn't be nearly as upset as I am by his vocal support of mob violence and doxing. Mob violence is literally illegal for reasons that you'd think would be obvious to an educated black man. Doxing isn't illegal, but life ruination in response to legally protected speech still comes off as a violation of liberal principles.

I can easily say that I object to Ramsey's encouragement of political violence on meta-level grounds, but when I object to his support of doxing, am I objecting on a meta-level principle, or an object-level one? I don't know. What I do know is that I'm not objecting to boycotting as a strategy, I just don't think Rowling warrants it to the extent that someone who is opposed to liberalism and supportive of criminal violence does. Maybe she still does warrant it. But definitely not as much.

In response to the second paragraph, I mean, it's normal for people to support some kinds of violence in their heart of hearts, but we used to have strong norms against it that prevented people from saying it out loud. The idea that people can say it out loud with no repercussion frightens me.

How much energy do you want to invest in trying not to give money to your political enemies?

Money is investment; attention is energy. Framing avoidance of an entirely opt-in loss of resources (and indeed, their transfer to your enemies) as an expenditure unto itself is nonsensical and confused.

So that's a yes to trans activists being tactically correct if directionally wrong?

I mean, I am not one for saying "No ethical consumption under capitalism" because I am not anti-capitalist, but it's basically true that you cannot completely avoid giving money to people and institutions and causes you oppose. Where each person is going to set their line is different, but personally "I won't consume any media made by people I hate" isn't a compelling proposition to me.

So that's a yes to trans activists being tactically correct if directionally wrong?

I'd flip this to "directionally correct, tactically wrong," especially given the whole "website for targeting streamers playing the stupid wizard game" thing.

Most people who give a shit set their line as ‘whatever is particularly in my face about it’. A point I try to explain to the people boycotting Girl Scout cookies over ties to planned parenthood every year.

I honestly don't understand your argument.

Yes, trans activists are correct, I'd say strategically more than tactically; cancellations and boycotts work. They haven't succeeded with Rowling yet, but she's a uniquely hard target. In what sense are they directionally wrong? I do not care to lecture my enemies on morals and goals, it's a given that we disagree. In any case, the premise of voting with your wallet and denying the other party your capital is of course sound – and morally legitimate.

it's basically true that you cannot completely avoid giving money to people and institutions and causes you oppose

Strawman (or what's the term). Only God is perfect and complete; you totally can make sure of preferentially supporting people you want to support or at least not giving advantage to the opposite group. The point is not purity spiralling in the manner of religious hardliners with absolute dietary taboos, but changing the battleground in ways you deem preferable. Paying Ramsay is not the same as paying Mel Gibson, although the latter is presumably still a node in the same Hollywood economy. Additionally, boycott sends the message that certain attitudes can be financially detrimental; even if parties which are directly at war are fanatical and don't care much about profits, they depend on many mercantile agents.

Or not. I remember a few years ago some in CWR felt that movie industry might «go woke go broke». Well, this never happened, people keep consuming this trash. Wokes are more principled than conservatives – who, ultimately, would rather pay for their own demonization than be deprived of the experience of watching Marvel kung-fu on a big screen.

I honestly don't understand your argument.

My argument is that boycotting things is stupid except in rare cases where your boycott actually has the leverage to pressure the people you are trying to influence. Otherwise, it's just performative. It might make you feel better to say you're not giving money to people you hate, but it has no other impact.

From whence do the rare effective boycotts emerge? Do the ineffective boycotts help build support for the effective ones, for example by "raising awareness"? Progressives have long believed so, proceeded from that belief, and have achieved overwhelming success. What is your evidence to argue that they are wrong?

Class consciousness is useful in an environment of class conflict. Remove the class conflict, and it can be safely left on the shelf. Fail to remove the class consciousness, and it will inevitably proliferate.

From whence do the rare effective boycotts emerge?

The canonical example, the civil rights bus boycotts, worked because the boycotters, being a substantial portion of the bus company's customers, had enough leverage to cause them financial harm.

How many examples do you know of successful boycotts arising from moral outrage?

Arguably the end of apartheid was in part brought about by social pressure on South Africa, but I don't know the history well enough to say that's definitely the case.

Most boycotts, it seems to me, especially the modern form which consists of digital culture warriors screaming about things you shouldn't buy, attract some media attention depending on the issues, but rarely actually have much impact. Conservatives love to say "Go woke, go broke," but where is there any evidence of this? I think this is as much copium as the trans activists I've seen insisting that Hogwarts Legacy is a terrible, low-rated, buggy game, even as it breaks sales records.

The canonical example, the civil rights bus boycotts, worked because the boycotters, being a substantial portion of the bus company's customers, had enough leverage to cause them financial harm.

Sure, but why did they choose to do so? Was it an idea they developed entirely independently, or was it the end-point of a long influence campaign?

How many examples do you know of successful boycotts arising from moral outrage?

Are we counting only boycotts that actually have to be carried out and materially impact the target's finances? I can't think of a single one offhand. On the other hand, examples abound of shows, games, books, films, shows, websites, podcasts, etc cancelled or censored on threat of bad publicity, either directly or by threatening their partners or providers. These seem to me to be successful boycotts, no?

Conservatives love to say "Go woke, go broke," but where is there any evidence of this? I think this is as much copium as the trans activists I've seen insisting that Hogwarts Legacy is a terrible, low-rated, buggy game, even as it breaks sales records.

What evidence there was came from before the 2014-2015 inflection point. Since then, no, I think "get woke go broke" is entirely cope. It's rather the opposite these days, it seems to me. And of course, Hogwarts Legacy is making a mint, it's true! And I have tasks stacking up about art I need to rework for my company's game, because my boss worried that it's too close to the criticisms being leveled at Hogwarts.

The Woke don't always get their way, but they get their way much, much more often than anybody else does. One misses 100% of the shots one does not take; they certainly miss a lot, but given the sheer volume of the shots they fire, they can afford to. They are, observably, winning. That win doesn't look like them tanking a flagpole triple-A harry potter vidya release. It looks like them decisively shaping the entire ecosystem that actually creates such games, the artists, the coders, the designers, the press, and the public as well, such that things that get made conform more and more to their preferences, while things that don't conform tend, on average, to perform less well or to not get made at all regardless of how well they'd perform. And no matter the result of any individual struggle, their faction gains strength and influence for the next fight, always and without fail.

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From whence do the rare effective boycotts emerge?

Strong prexistent organization (like, for example, pre V2 Catholic Church), and dedication to the cause.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Legion_of_Decency

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_condemned_by_the_Legion_of_Decency

I condemn all indecent and immoral motion pictures, and those which glorify crime or criminals. I promise to do all that I can to strengthen public opinion against the production of indecent and immoral films, and to unite with all who protest against them. I acknowledge my obligation to form a right conscience about pictures that are dangerous to my moral life. I pledge myself to remain away from them. I promise, further, to stay away altogether from places of amusement which show them as a matter of policy.

How many people today would sign such pledge and take it seriously? Few, and if you replaced "indecent and immoral" with "anti-white" even fewer.

How many people today would sign such pledge and take it seriously? Few, and if you replaced "indecent and immoral" with "anti-white" even fewer.

Do people sign pledges like that for anti-racism? It seems to me the modern equivalents are somewhat more informal and reliant on creating a vibe, a "room" for people to "read".

Yes, trans activists are correct, I'd say strategically more than tactically; cancellations and boycotts work. They haven't succeeded with Rowling yet, but she's a uniquely hard target. In what sense are they directionally wrong? I do not care to lecture my enemies on morals and goals, it's a given that we disagree. In any case, the premise of voting with your wallet and denying the other party your capital is of course sound – and morally legitimate.

That's the thing though, it's not a given you disagree any more man, that sentence is couched in an entire paragraph of agreeing. Do we have to become them to beat them? Is there really no path to the future which leverages the flourishing of human thought instead of its suppression? If that's the only choice we get - whose jackboot is crushing whose throat? - then fuck the whole enterprise.

You can call it immature, I am definitely immature, but if this is the world we live in, if left vs right is highest order and there is no path to compromise, no path of embracing our better nature instead of our worst, then I don't care what you think. I don't care what anyone thinks, I AM, and I hate.

I don't really have a choice if this is the way of the world. I point blank refuse to be a part of any enterprise which judges my loyalty based on my entertainment preferences. I will be deemed a traitor eventually, because I won't stop to appease anyone. Instead I will reaasume my old labourer nickname - passionfingers - and I will fuck everything I touch until it all falls apart.

I just don't think it's possible to draw a line and go no further. Take this place for example. How is it ok to chat with the enemy - sometimes very jovially even - if it's not ok to consume their media? You say the point is not purity spiralling, but have you ever actually seen anyone perform a purity quarter turn? They're called purity spirals because the spiralling is inevitable once you start. The start is the same as the end, it is someone losing their patience and crossing the line - by starting it you endorse the race to the bottom or revel in hypocrisy.

That said, one last caveat - nobody should be paying for media ever unless it is specifically to thank the creator for a job well done after the fact, or if it's something you have watched being independently built from the ground up. If it was made by a studio or network in the last ten years, it has been designed maliciously to extract value from you with product placement, advertising, propaganda and so on, and paying for that is for simps. Even if you want to see it on the big screen there are a dozen ways to do it without paying for it.

That's the thing though, it's not a given you disagree any more man, that sentence is couched in an entire paragraph of agreeing.** Do we have to become them to beat them?** Is there really no path to the future which leverages the flourishing of human thought instead of its suppression? If that's the only choice we get - whose jackboot is crushing whose throat? - then fuck the whole enterprise.

The defense of beauty and truth is in and of itself superior to the defense of depravity. Your ?enemies? want a world in which the normalized castration of children is celebrated as the highest virtue. They are not even content with waiting for 'trans' children to reveal themselves to a doctor, but actively work to fill every medium with messages telling subsceptible girls that they might actually be boys. You could crucify every single one of them above an iq cutoff of 115; and it would still not be morally comparable.

I really don't get how people seemingly on the other side can find themselves uncertain about these things. I'm left to conclude that they must be missing some seemingly basic human experiences, like color blind people vs the rest of us*, except for beauty. I look at red and green and see this infinite chasm; you look at it and see slightly different shades of gray (or whatever), while the woke say they are the same or invert them. You are honest so you can point out the tiny difference between shades and I imagine you must be like me; but we might as well be of different species.

  • I suppose the colour blind analogy might be off, in that I might be the outlier here, sure seems like it. Anyway, we all might aswell act in our natures and could never have done anything else. The one thing I can say for my side to a person like you is that, while both the woke and I are committed to mutual annihilation, i'm the only one who intends not to come after you when (or before) I'm done with them.

Yes, fine, I agree with them. Theirs are beliefs befitting actors, not consumerist NPCs who fancy themselves connoisseurs of «entertainment».

You say the point is not purity spiralling, but have you ever actually seen anyone perform a purity quarter turn?

You insist on missing the point. Purity is entirely irrelevant. Intent is what matters. The Author isn't dead except when s/he physically is; this postmodernist theory about freedom of interpretation is not an excuse to delude oneself about content, but a utilitarian justification for marauding on the culture war battlefront. It matters who holds the picked up weapon.

You and @Conservautism here both seem to underestimate our inferential distance. From here it looks like I'm not «more right-wing» than him nor less principled and appreciative of Enlightenment values than you. It's just that I am taking essences of things more seriously, and on account of this I have become less enamored with their forms and inessential parts.

In this case, the essence is Ramsay's racial grievance and hatred (the Antifa thing is an isolated puny consequence), and political intention implemented as an indoctrination project delivered via flashy movies about Spiderman; the content that you consume is entirely vacuous in the absence of that core. It's as if you had asked me to marvel as the elegant shape and immaculate engineering of a syringe used to spread AIDS HIV. I will take a gander – sure, industrial design is cool. But I can't get its purpose out of my mind, and unlike Cypher from Matrix, am unwilling to; consequently, this purpose takes almost all the aesthetic charm out of the thing by providing a more authentic frame for perceiving it. Meanwhile, your willingness to suspend the awareness of its intent just to enjoy the shine of its edges a bit longer strikes me as infantile. Like a child playing with a firearm. Moreover: I'd have at least respected it if you were simply more magnanimous and capable of decoupling; but you limit yourself to appreciating the thing outside of its proper context. You only agree to notice noises, shapes, color blots, literally taken plots – the surface, the most trivial, childish part of the art.

To be clear: not all art is political simply because artists have political beliefs. For example, Demoscene is, far as I can tell, overwhelmingly about showing off one's technical chops, good taste and intelligence (because compression is comprehension). A great deal of music is apolitical. Even the most fanatical woke artist can occasionally succumb to the pure childlike creative impulse. And one's politics may have nothing to do with hot topics of the culture war – whatever Rowling «wanted to say with» Harry Potter, it had zero relation to transgenderism; Brandon Sanderson's Mormonism is not substantially informing the magic of his novels. It can be argued that their enemies are trespassing some norm by vilifying their «civilian» work. Okay.

But those AAA movies with conspicuously cast racial archetypes are means to a political end, made by people at least as serious as myself; thus, they are political art. Their features that captivate you are as utilitarian as Ozy's eloquence when she implores of people to not prioritise their kin over other tribes. Just weapons. Or while we're at it: Ozy argues that Serrano's Piss Christ is aesthetically beautiful. But, even if true, that's the incidental part; the essential part is normalizing pissing on Christianity. Any intricate shape in a jar of orange liquid would be equally pretty; the specific choice of a theme tells us that beauty was not the point, and focusing on appearances is missing the point. Likewise with narratives, character casts and moral lessons of high production value Western slop that you defend as your «preference»: the point of that content is who-whom, whose boot goes on whose face. You are lashing out at me, but I'm a mere messenger.

I know that weapons have a way of being beautiful (for that matter, boots too). You see, I've always liked MLRS launchers, this staple of Soviet war doctrine, and Soviet war songs e.g. 1 2 – not favorites, just germane to the topic. One of the most iconic weapons of the war is BM series MLRS nicknamed Katyusha, associated with the war song of the same name; recently I've heard it played by a dude with an accordion on the street and literally teared up. My love for MLRS is not out of any appreciation for their effect on intended targets, mind you; it's just such glorious fireworks, and such elevating music. People who don't speak Russian like it all too sometimes – just check the comments.

But consider such lyrics:

In our hearts is burning the love to the native land,

We go into a deadly battle for the honour of the native country.

Cities are burning, covered in smoke,

In the grey forests is rumbling the cruel god of war.

Artillerymen, Stalin gave the order!

Artillerymen, the Motherland calls us!

From hundreds thousands of batteries,

For the tears of our mothers,

For our Motherland — fire! Fire!

Know, my dear mother, know, my wife or girlfriend,

Know, distant home and my entire family,

That our blizzard of steel is beating and burning the enemy,

That we are bringing freedom into the native land!

How do you figure this Russian song would sound in Ukraine today? Say, in Mariupol? And yet this kind of outcome is the song's intent, the cultivation of unthinking rah-rah patriotism and obedience to the Great Leader. I may keep listening to it - but I won't pay for the ticket to Red Army Choir's concert, if a chance comes by.

Still. It'd be less self-abasing of me to pay for a Red Army concert than it is for white Americans to pay for their black supremacist Hollywood stuff. I am of the same tribe as those Russians, and they're calling to commit murder in my name too – in a certain twisted and misguided sense; in the name of the glory of the Empire that stubbornly sings in my blood. Leonard Cohen sang: «I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons» (obligatory Scott) and I see where he was coming from.

But most people who bought Cohen's tickets were hypnotized by the beauty of the other party's weapons, which is a far lower mark. And people who go to Spiderverse to, essentially, finance Ramsey's team that intends to do what it preaches are not more enlightened than myself. They are just in denial about the nature of what they consume.

...A song I like even more is this. I'd rather it were about Whites, not Reds. Admittedly ROA songs are, artistically, not as cool.

I am of the same tribe as those Russians, and they're calling to commit murder in my name too – in a certain twisted and misguided sense; in the name of the glory of the Empire that stubbornly sings in my blood. Leonard Cohen sang: «I'm guided by the beauty of our weapons» (obligatory Scott) and I see where he was coming from.

Pls differentiate between the glory of having your (probably vicariously) Empire step on the faces of lesser surrounding nations as a terminal goal, and the aesthetics of deadly weapons, high morale, all that.

Pls differentiate

Why would I? The Warhammer-like (actually clearly superior) aesthetics is just sugarcoating for the terminal goal of the Empire, and a yet another vehicle for justifying it in minds of the target audience. I'm the target audience for Russian imperialism; Russian imperial aesthetics is the sugar coat, the vehicle, the high-grade anaesthetic for the doctrine that sends my less lucky brethren into the trenches near Bachmut, or wherever the frontline of this hell currently is. Sure, they're also pushed by conformism and material interests, but every marginal point of persuasion and dissuasion of dissidents counts. Ramsay aesthetics, likewise, send people into Antifa. A lesser evil, perhaps, but in a higher-impact locale.

My argument is that once you learn to recognize patterns of thought of authors and terminal goals of essentially political art, you lose almost all interest in «compartmentalized» and «differentiated» readings and justification of their topics on grounds of «free speech» or «artistic expression» or «preference» or whatever, because you see all those grounds and frames as being ultimately false and or myopic and or beside the point; you start relating to the given piece of political art on the basis of its instrumental essence as informed by terminal goals of its manufactures, not patterns of its sugar coat.

I can still appreciate the technique and the quale evoked conditional on abstracting away from the essence of the art piece, if I so choose and no part is too intrinsically grating (like I imagine Piss Christ is for devout Christians). That's easy enough. But that's a more or less academic discussion, not in any way a valid justification for material support of authors and distributors.

@Fruck fair enough that this was not mainly addressed to you. But. I suggest you work on your self-esteem. Many people, not you alone (e.g. the obviously smart @f3zinker) say I'm hard to parse, which does not make me smart at all. The apparent obscurantism is on me, not on them. I try to be as clear as the pragmatics of my message allows, but seems like that's not good enough. If you don't see how my response relates to your defense of preferred entertainment, I shall do better to explain myself whenever I get back to this issue. Some day when I'm less drunk.

My preference is no censorship.

Refusing to mistake the volume of thing for its surface and acting accordingly is not censorship.

I will consume anything for its story - I will consume a Michael Bay film, a silent film, a comic, a song, an eroge, an advertisement. I will pay for it afterwards if I believe it was worth it. To butcher the old saying, to me knowledge is a virtue, and censorship is a sin.

There are hundreds of lifetimes worth of prime knowledge that Michael Bay is obscuring from you. I suggest (only half in jest) that you try some Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko – I've listened to his «The River Sparkles» (1892) today and it was good and enlightening. You've grown up in an environment where knowledge is dwarfed by content that apes the shape of living words and human lives as grotesquely and adequately in the low-order technical sense as Stable Diffusion apes human imagery. Same for me.

We can and indeed must do better than that, if those values you profess are genuine.

I never said "give this Ramsey dude all your money, what's the worst that could happen?"

That's a good start. I am saying that there is a genuine reason not to give him any. It's not just that he's a tribal political enemy. It's that he is a political artist – which is very different from an artist who also has opinions about politics. Understanding this difference is useful strategically. But if you don't care about winning, how about that: it's crucial to developing taste for art as such.

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Well that stings. Did you read my top level reply to the op?

My estimate of our inferential gap is based on four things - you are here on the motte, you are very smart, you appreciate the truth, and you are Russian. Thats pretty much the extent of what I know about you. And I'm still missing your point I think, because this post almost reads like it was meant for someone else. I'm not doing it on purpose, I am just not smart enough to get it I'm afraid. Maybe I should try to explain my perspective better?

In my perspective, purity spirals are sequential games of moral one-upmanship. People rarely try to start them, they start on their own when someone feels the need to justify actions they took or plan to take, usually actions they feel guilty about but deem necessary. We are trapped in one now. I wish we weren't, I really tried to avoid it. I tried to frame my post as worried and scared but friendly, because that's how I felt, and I am dismayed it read to you like lashing out.

My preference is not for marvel movies, or black supremacist Hollywood stuff, or shiny edges - I don't know where in my post you got any of that. My preference is no censorship. I appreciate media because I believe stories have power. Every story is the amalgam of the feelings, thoughts and ideas the author wanted to promote, and all can provide value, even if it's as a warning or a cautionary tale. I will consume anything for its story - I will consume a Michael Bay film, a silent film, a comic, a song, an eroge, an advertisement. I will pay for it afterwards if I believe it was worth it. To butcher the old saying, to me knowledge is a virtue, and censorship is a sin.

You appear to be making your way down the road to censorship, and I think you should stop, because I like you. I think you were angry when you wrote that and I think you are angry at the moment, and while I don't know why, I am sure your anger is justified. But I also know that most smart people regret acting in anger when they have cooled down, and I know all too well how hard it can be to remember that while you are angry. Perhaps that is the inferential distance, perhaps I think that because I have the privilege. But when I read the second half of your post the distance appears diminished.

After all, you like big guns and may keep listening to kick ass war music but won't buy a ticket. I have paid to go to the cinema twice in my life. It wasn't to a spider man either time, but on one of those occasions it was to a bat man. Aside from intellect, what makes us different? I never said "give this Ramsey dude all your money, what's the worst that could happen?" I said if the right is going to start cancelling people and censoring shit too then fuck this planet.

I said if the right is going to start cancelling people and censoring shit too then fuck this planet.

what happens if the right is, as demonstrable so far, unable to cancel anyone not on the right?

they lose even more than they already have and the other side which has no qualms with censorship will censor more

the reason people agree to détentes like anti-censorship is because they could lose or at the very least suffer significant harm

if they don't think they could lose, they're going to censor or exercise power in some other way

if the right explains to their opposition that they're harmless because they just so darn-tooting believe in principles or whatever, then their opposition takes away that they're harmless and they march forward

"fuck this planet" is an understandable emotion, but it also means you lose and the people you don't like shape the world in their image

we cannot escape this, no one is coming to save us

until one side sheds the mindvirus which renders them harmless, then the other side has no reason to stop and they won't

syringe used to spread AIDS

Hate hate to be that guy.

But AIDS is the condition one develops if the HIV virus (yes I know virus twice) is left untreated for long enough. So you would be spreading HIV with a needle not AIDS.

It's also not that easy to spread HIV with a needle, it dies within minutes exposed to air.

I admire the technicality but are you sure it is ungrammatical to say that one is spreading the condition? After all, infections per se, with modern treatment, are almost meaningless if the intent is to debilitate people.

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The fact that the trans activists adopt a tactic is very good evidence that it's effective. I have plenty of criticisms of trans activists but ineffectiveness definitely isn't one of them. I also don't think it's an immoral tactic to use: it isn't fraudulent, violent or rude and nobody should be obligated to buy from anyone they don't want to.

I'll usually try to switch from businesses with more extreme leftist positions to less extreme versions when reasonably practical. For example, I switched from Amazon Prime to Walmart Plus and I switched from Gillette razors an electric razor when they ran their "men are trash" commercial a few years ago. I don't think my side has the numbers to make this an extremely effective tactic but it is something at least. I certainly wouldn't blame anyone who just wants to grill for seeing the Marvel movie though.

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!

Can't see any problem to follow the advice of Prof. Preobrazhensky from the old soviet movie "Heart of a dog":

—And never read soviet newspapers before dinner.

—Hmm… But there are no other newspapers.

—In that case don’t read any at all.

Worth noting that there isn't a contradiction here. It's actually a 1988 movie, thus deep into Perestroika, based on a 1925 book (I recommend it, Bulgakov is good in general, though M&M is overhyped by our equivalent of «art hoes»).

Its publication was initially prohibited in the Soviet Union, but it circulated in samizdat until it was officially released in the country in 1987. It was almost immediately adapted into a movie, which was aired in late 1988 on First Channel of Soviet Television, gained almost universal acclaim and attracted many readers to the original Bulgakov text.

Also worth noting i guess that the movie's main theme is heavily anti-blankslate. Which is kind of funny in the modern day as it gives a certain social layer of russians a cognitive dissonance. They tend to like the movie previously as it's heavily anti-soviet, but now it turns out it goes against certain modern western shibboleth's. A perfect redpilled movie from soviets, huh..

It all becomes even more funny when you learn that the director of the movie, Vladimir Bortko, is a hardcore member of a Russian Communist party for the last 15 years. Speaking about only american politics being complicated.

If you really want to be principled about this, find a public screening and then watch it there. That way your dollars do not go to the director . I did this with some of Michael Moore's movies .

Another way could be to offset your ticket price with a donation to a an opposing group . If the director only makes 10% this is pretty cheap. For a $15 ticket, how much will eventually go into antifa's hands? Probably none.

But if we limited our entertainment and tastes choices to 'people whose views agree with ours' it would be very limited.

Another kernel to think about: by not buying a ticket to the sequel, you’re not only avoiding giving money to someone who hates you but not financially supporting a form of entertainment you enjoy. Which is more important to you, signaling to the movie industry to make more films like Into the Spiderverse or keeping your money away from a pro-antifa type? My choice would be towards the former. There’s not much quality bigger-budget films these days thanks to Disney-Marvel. I avoid seeing their stuff in theaters now unless I feel like a dose of visual popcorn. The first movie was a solid story with interesting, experimental visuals, with no pro-antifa or other wokish messaging. If the sequel follows suit, then that’s not a problem for me. If there’s evidence that the director-now-producer’s views have seeped into it, then skip it.

Something to compliment /u/haroldbkny‘s take: consider “death of the author”. Once a work is created, it stands on its own separate from whatever the author intended. Into the Spiderverse is not pro-antifa work just because the director is so. My personal experience with this is Joss Whedon. Buffy, Angel, and, to a smaller extent, Firefly were all huge influences on my late childhood. I still rewatch them with some regularity. However, it turns out Whedon the man is not quite the feminist crusader Whedon the writer/director is. He might be an egomaniac jerk who verbally abused some of the actresses on his shows. I’m not going to let that ruin them for me.

It is a bit funny because at the end of the day Firefly doesn’t come across as overly feminist.

Sure, Zoe kicks ass. But…there are a lot of traditional values about masculinity viewed as positive.

True, of the three Buffy is the one that's most overtly feminist. But they're all of the 90's/early 00's egalitarian brand of feminism that uplifted good strong female characters without tearing down the male characters.

Just go, you don’t need our permission.

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?

The real emasculation going on here is the very act of taking this decision seriously. Out of the Chad and the Virgin, who do you think would do that?

Buy a ticket to a different movie and then walk into the Spiderman theater instead. If your theater has reserved seating you can pick an off peak time and then go in a little late to make sure you don't take somebody's seat.

Good idea. I wasn't sure this would work with 3D, but upon reflection, I could find a 3D movie showing at the same time to get my glasses.

What's weird is, I've never had this problem with "woke" movies. I even thought the 2016 Ghostbusters remake was an okay, but largely forgettable comedy movie. I've seen TV shows that have obnoxious messaging forced into them, but not movies. In fact, the messaging of Into the Spider-Verse was, by the standards of POC-centered media, surprisingly conservative. I don't think spoiler tags work on The Motte the way they do on Reddit, so stop reading now if you care about spoilers for this movie.

! Miles's dad is a cop, and he wants his son to be responsible, but Miles prefers the relaxed attitude of his semi-estranged uncle, who takes him to do graffiti at the subway stop after closing. Miles later finds out that his uncle is a professional hitman, and it's implied that the falling out his father and uncle had led to his uncle getting deeper and deeper into the criminal lifestyle. Miles convinces his uncle to quit, and in response, he's killed by his boss, the most powerful gangster in the city. Miles makes up with his father at the end of the movie and they make a "Rest in Power" memorial for their lost family member. <!

It's anti-criminality, respects the police as an institution, and even says that people who've done bad things can always redeem themselves and become better.. which, funnily enough, is something one of the movie's directors doesn't believe, at least not when applied to his outgroup.

Actually, now that I've typed this, I did think of one thing that bothered me politically in a recent movie, and that was in Spielberg's remake of West Side Story. I loved it and it was one of the best movies of 2021, but they took the tomboy character, Anybody's, and made her into a transgender man. I'm fine with trans people existing and being represented in movies, but this tomboy erasure is frustrating. It's as if they're saying, "you can't be a tomboy, you have to be a transgender man or a butch lesbian." I wish they wouldn't do that.

this tomboy erasure is frustrating. It's as if they're saying, "you can't be a tomboy, you have to be a transgender man or a butch lesbian." I wish they wouldn't do that.

I agree with this. A fair number of butch lesbians also hate this trend. Like no, they don't want to be guys, they want to be butch lesbians.

Is there a way I can have my cake and eat it too here?

No. You have to decide whether you're OK with spending money on art from people that hate you or not. I've personally arrived at a completely useless position that lacks any coherent ethics behind it - I'll buy movies, games, or books made by people that hate me as long as I'm not confronted with public accounts of them hating me in a way that I personally find too irritating to enjoy the products. If everyone adopted that position, it would at least be a bit of cultural detente, even if it's an unstable equilibrium. In practice, that does seem to be what most people do - don't think about it too much, don't worry about it too much, but pass on their products if they've been really vocal about hating you and you find it sufficiently irritating.

If that's what most people do, why did Gina Carano (for example) get screwed over? Is it just pre-emptive striking from execs who respond to headlines?

Is it just pre-emptive striking from execs who respond to headlines?

Obviously yes? Same thing happened with James Gunn. If the Hollywood execs who fired him from Guardians of the Galaxy had done their due diligence they would have realized it was right-wing troll groups stirring up controversy about him, but that didn't matter. It wasn't "most people" that the execs were responding to, it was, in both cases, paranoid PR departments seeing (potential) controversy about their properties and trying to head it off, perhaps with some inside-baseball career jockeying that has nothing to do with ideology.

It's sad, then, that Peter Ramsey's comments only get a Bounding into Comics headline. The conservative media sucks.

My understanding is that the people running media companies like Disney are apolitical and respond to market incentives, because I can't imagine people who place politics first would get that far in the business world. Therefore, I have a hard time believing that the number of people outraged by Carano or Roseanne is so insignificant that it makes no difference, since, evidently, it did.

This is getting off-track, though. Walterodim's advice for how I should approach things is still good. I just don't know if it's true that most people act this way.

The industry is full of leftists that hate her and getting rid of her cost them approximately zero Star Wars nerds.

I view "sometimes my money goes people I don't like" as a price for participating in an economy. If I buy free-range eggs from a farmer, what I know of their political beliefs? And that farmer probably has to buy crops and stuff from some other people I know even less about. If I buy a Big Mac, the profits will be diluted to countless stockholders after the suits have taken their cut. As a whole, people who profit from my Big Mac have not a coherent opinion.

Yeah, I'll concede that my problem is entirely psychological.

Pay for a movie you want to support and sneak into the showing of the one you want to watch. Go a few weeks after both release and both theaters are likely to be pretty empty and no one should care.

Hogwart’s Legacy has gotten controversy because of Rowling’s transgender kerfuffle, but the game has another representation issue: it prevents you from playing as a pale-skinned Northern European. You can’t play with the natural skin tone of the book’s characters, or the author, or the race of the actors in the films.

JK Rowling is an Anglo-Saxon, a Briton, with fair pale skin. Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson also have pale skin from (mostly) Northern European ancestry (Radcliffe is half Eastern European). Pale skin of this type is a genetic feature of certain human populations. These are pale folk; they belong to the global minority who have pale skin. Putting Rupert Grint in the Mediterranean sun wouldn’t result in a tan, but a burn.

For some reason, the game designers have decided to prevent you from playing a pale-skinned character. The most pale you can make it is closer to my skin tone, which is partially Southern European. You can see the skin options here as well as normal apolitical people complaining about not being able to represent themselves in the game. A post on the game’s subreddit got thousands of upvotes from Northern Europeans confused why there isn’t a pale skin feature.

I find this actually complaint-worthy. Surely whoever was responsible for the skin modifier has seen the movies in which the cast has largely fair skin. Was this some kind of weird progressive move that the devs made, some bizarre “deal with it Anglos” to dab on racists? It bothers me because I go on Twitch or YouTube and I see pale Harry Potter fans forced to play someone who does not represent their actual ethnicity... when the books and the movies were clearly representative of their culture. To be clear, a variety of races and skin tones are an excellent idea — my befuddlement is just at the exclusion of the original skin tone of the Harry Potter franchise.

Quick edit: while you might think, “only a user here would notice such a thing”, there really are a number of normies concerned about this issue.

I don’t see it at all. While I’m not surprised real people are making a fuss, how many of them would have noticed without Twitter?

Actually, reading those comments, maybe they just wanted to roleplay My Immortal. Unrealistic beauty standards strike again.

It’s not really discussed on Twitter, but then again I don’t think that’s where most people discuss video games anyway.

Depends. Wizard game witch hunting seems like something people are discussing on Twitter.

Quick edit: while you might think, “only a user here would notice such a thing”, there really are a number of normies concerned about this issue.

I don't think few dozen reddit posts over the course of 24 hours (several very clearly being the same guy) demonstrates anything of the sort. The video you linked also very clearly shows the presence paler skin options. This reeks of manufactured controversy.

The game was just released for early access yesterday or so, and the go-to community for discussing the game has a front page post on the issue, including calling out the mods for removing the previous posts on the issue talking about the issue. That qualifies as strong evidence that normies are indeed concerned about the issue. You can click through some of the profiles to see if they’re manufactured.

Just for fun I clicked through the accounts from one of the top Reddit threads. I see a he/him bio’d food blogger, a Romanian Harry Potter fan with gastritis, a 6-year Harry Potter fan… so yeah, I don’t see much evidence of astroturf or anything

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fOH8jdFSKyM&t=77 looks pale enough to me to count as unambiguously European, especially if you pick lighter eye and hair colors.

Yes, there are many people with paler skin, but neither is https://youtube.com/watch?v=fOH8jdFSKyM&t=83 dark enough to represent most Africans, let alone Nyakim Gatwech.

I'm from probably one of the palest if not the palest populations in the world, and it's pretty unambiguous to me that the video shows there are pale options.

Looks to me like a swatch of skin tones under a hot color temp bulb.

That said, I really appreciate everyone and their brother trying to find a way to culture ware this 6.5/10 piece of tie in media. Shows how brain poisoned this whole thing makes us.

It did kind of stand out to me. It's not a big problem in my opinion, I've never really been the type that cared to make a character that resembles myself as much as possible but can understand people who would like more customization. It really does seem strange given the IP is pretty pale in general. Zoomed in a lot of the characters are freckled, I honestly think this is probably some kind of bug.

edit: I went back into the editor, and you really can get quite a bit palers, there is a skin color slider on the face screen and another complexion slider on the scar screen, with the right preset there's still paler people in the world but darker people than the darker end. I'm updating to this being a non-problem.

I have to agree with this. The skin tones also remind me of Fallout 3 and 4, where there was no paper white skin but some of the character options were definitely meant to represent white Americans. Everyone looks pretty ruddy. I'm of pure Anglo/Breton extraction and my Japanese wife has lighter skin than me, I'm more on the pink side.

This sounds very plausible to me. This sounds like more of an oversight than a deliberate move to use less than a normal range of skin tone.

Turns out USA did blew out Nord Stream: How America Took Out The Nord Stream Pipeline.

It was obvious to anyone paying attention, but now it's pretty much confirmed.

Of course I already see the people married to the opposite conclusion trying to discredit the journalist (on of the most decorated and impactful journalists of all time), and his sources: anonymous: (as if established publications didn't use anonymous sources).

  • -22

I think this topic is sensitive to Americans, since it basically means they aren't the Good Guys that they were led to believe. People in general want to think the best of their country, and understandably so. So I am not surprised by the pushback. (We should also make a distinction between the US Govt and the American people. I have a high opinion of the latter but a low of the former).

The question that needs to be asked in these situations is always the same: cui bono? It clearly isn't Russia. Having Europe more dependent on its energy and not less is clearly in their interest. It isn't Germany either, which resisted pressure to end it for years before the invasion. Why would China or France blow it up? India? Doesn't have the capability. Obviously there's only one country big enough and powerful enough left standing to have done it and which has been voicing very loud denunciations and outrage over its existence for years. The US of A. Biden even blatantly threatened that NS2 would be "put to an end one way or another". You can't get more clear than that.

Instead of grappling with this issue from a structural basis, folks have been trying to personally smear Hersh. It's the old "shoot the messenger" tactic. Will it work? Maybe for some, but I suspect for most of the non-Americans, the US was already a prime suspect and so his reporting doesn't really shock anyone.

The US will continue to officially deny it and Americans will want to believe any story that absolves their country of blame (understandably) whereas much of the rest of the world will just go on, seeing America in a more cynical light than before.

I think this topic is sensitive to Americans, since it basically means they aren't the Good Guys that they were led to believe.

Yes, but reality doesn't care about your feelings. If you follow anti-imperialists like Aron Mate and Max Blumenthal, it's obvious that USA has not been the good guys in the past few decades, and if you read Noam Chomsky you realize that has never been the case. Of course most people from USA are not aware of that.

How many Americans know they are occupying one third of Syria right now to get their oil? I bet not many.

We should also make a distinction between the US Govt and the American people.

Of course.

Instead of grappling with this issue from a structural basis, folks have been trying to personally smear Hersh.

It's always the same tactic. The Hunter Biden laptop story was a "conspiracy theory" and anyone who tried to investigate it like Glenn Greenwald was smeared. Max Blumenthal and The Grayzone wikipedia pages are completely vandalized. They tried to do the same with Seymour Hersh (somebody added that he was a conspiracy theorist), but it seems there was pushback because Hersh is more reknowned.

It will work, because even though Americans know the mainstream media lies, they for some reason believe that when it truly matters they'll tell the truth.

whereas much of the rest of the world will just go on

I don't think the citizens in Germany will just go on, they'll see it for what it is: a supposed ally engaged in clandestine energy sabotage without regards to what would happen to their economy, just to punish Russia for geopolitical reasons, and destroying their industry in the process.

I bet many Germans are realizing just now that USA is not their ally.

Ah yes the hundreds of US troops in eastern Syria occupation to get their oil….

The Kurds / SDF take all the oil revenues. Lol. The country that produces the most oil in the world does not need to steal Syria’s, and the Syrian oil production is inconsequential to the world oil prices markets.

I don't think the citizens in Germany will just go on

I suspect you vastly underestimate the meekness of the modern German these days. I'd love to be proved wrong, but I don't think I will, sadly.

I lived in Germany for a while, and I'm aware of the weakness of German bureaucrats, but things change. In Mexico from one administration to the next the government changed from being a USA lapdog to be anti-imperialist.

If there was any spark that would ignite change in Germany, I think learning that USA blew up their pipeline is among the most significant that could happen.

Lapdogs don't call the shots.

What shots would be needed that Poland couldn't call?

Nah, I think there's a plenty-accessible frame in which someone believes that the US did it and believes that doing it was an affirmative good in the world. I mean, the entire concept of the US funneling arms/money to Ukraine could be viewed in the frame of, "Intervening in wars abroad is bad, so the US meddling in Ukraine is bad, which means America isn't the Good Guys," but there's also a frame of, "Actually, intervening in Ukraine is good for [reasons], so the US meddling in Ukraine means that America is the Good Guys."

Now, which set of these frames is actually right is more difficult, and I won't take a position at present. But there are far far far more obvious historical examples of the US very clearly not being the Good Guys that this particular action is highly unlikely to tip anyone's scales on that score.

Why.. more ?

Americans spend way more on the military, have a giant military with lots of naval units and have never shied from wrecking infrastructure for political purposes, and doing hairy deep sea shenanigans. (see e.g. Ivy Bells).

yeah already discussed, another criticism is here

his recent factually incorrect takes on the Syria gas attacks

OK. Starts of poisoning the well by claiming something is false without evidence. This might work on people with no critical thinking skills, but not me.

Especially because I know the attacks have been thoroughly debunked by Aron Mate.

Not going to waste my time.

Saw this linked by MR. Hadn't read the original, but started skimming this, and saw:

Early in Hersh’s article, he states that the secrecy of mission to destroy the pipelines was the top priority of the Biden Administration. This he states is the reason why diver graduates from the United States Navy Experimental Diving Unit were chosen instead of SEALs or other SOCOM units. Doing this Hersh states would bypass reporting of the operation to members of Congress or the “Gang of Eight”. In Hersh’s initial story, it appears that every precaution is being taken to avoid any leaks or bringing any unnecessary actors in on the mission.

Checked Hersh, and this portrayal checks out. Color me skeptical. My first reaction was, "Even if the try to push it through under Title 10 rather than Title 50, there's no way they could avoid a notification requirement." Doublechecked. h-Yup. Very skeptical. They'd almost certainly have to report.

Anyone who considers themselves a rationalist should have wide error bars on their conclusions for the pipeline bombing. Previously, there had been basically no evidence one way or the other as to who did it. People were just guessing based on their priors, which is fine, but being supremely confident in those guesses is bad epistemic hygiene.

This claim by Hersh is fairly weak evidence. The main problems:

  • Its only evidence is a single anonymous source. Journalists use anonymous sources all the time, but it still makes it less credible than someone who's willing to stake their reputation on the claim. Some of Hersh's previous claims (like his ridiculous Bin Laden story) used anonymous sources, but the claims crumbled under internal contradictions.

  • Most of the story is unfalsifiable.

  • One of the few bits that could actually be falsified, doesn't support Hersh's claim.

I'm not saying this claim is guaranteed to be wrong, but it needs a lot more evidence before it's convincing.

Of course I already see the people married to the opposite conclusion trying to discredit the journalist (on of the most decorated and impactful journalists of all time

Yeah, obviously, because how much you believe this story is based entirely on Hersh's reputation. Most of this story cannot be verified, so you're trusting that Hersh did his due diligence on this anonymous source to make sure they weren't a Russian agent or some nobody that was blowing smoke out of their ass. Hersh's previous work should be concerning in this regard. He's a journalist who seeks to attack US foreign policy no matter what. He'll always err on seeing the US as the Big Bad. Sometimes this leads to him being right like with Mai Lai, other times it leads him to be wrong like with Bin Laden or Syrian chemical weapons.

You're just more likely to trust him because he's claiming something that conforms to your preconceptions.

One of the few bits that could actually be falsified, doesn't support Hersh's claim.

Because the US, you know, the country that hacked control software of airgapped centrifuges and thus wrecked them wouldn't be able to, after months of preparation mess up badly secured data on a couple of websites in order to deflect attention ?

There's a response to this further in the Twitter thread.

It's so weird how people online think (or want others to think i guess) that the existence of public transponder data somehow means that everything that happens in the air is 1:1 reflected by something like FlightAware.

Not to pick on you, but don't you think it's a lot more likely that prior to leaving on a super-secret mission that could start a chain of events leading to WWIII if discovered -- you might turn your damn transponder off?

Hersh says in the article it’s supposed be during BALTOPS during a routine NATO exercise, so not covert.

Tweet thread already addresses this: https://twitter.com/joey_galvin/status/1623755578773209088

The mines were said to be planted during BALTOPS, the sonobuoy deployed later. Both would have been covert in the sense that nobody was supposed to find out what was going on -- again I find it implausible that the navies of the world publicly distribute accurate locational data for all of their vessels at all times; perhaps even more implausible than air forces.

If an aircraft turns off its transponder, it becomes an object of interest for plane spotting types.

So, it's not exactly the greatest idea if you don't want to draw attention.

I would rather fly such a mission at night, certainly -- do you really think the military can't get a plane in the air without the internet noticing?

Europe is densely populated, and with current technology, it's probably prudent to assume every approach and exit path from a runway is being recorded at all times by cameras.

How many military airports in continental Europe have ~10+ km exclusion zones around their runways ?

I'd not even rule out stuff such as air traffic radar raw data being available somewhere.

Many problems with trying to be sneaky these days.

So populated, much dense

Are you for real? Even if the Russians have spys parked in some godforsaken fjord 24/7, what are they going to say? ASW plane takes off from ASW base, big news.

ASW plane takes off from ASW base, big news.

Unless the planes have been flying out without transponders all the time, a plane flying out without one or turning it off would be suspicious.

Especially if a plane did something this uncharacteristic around the time a pipeline blows up.

Especially as American ASW planes are capable of blowing up a pipeline by themselves.. although at present they probably have to fly low.

More comments

If the secrecy of the operation was so important as to hack flight-monitoring websites, why bother with a flight as the delivery mechanism at all?

Set aside that this is inventing new claims that the author didn't make, or that it turns a lack of evidence into evidence of the conspiracy- it still relies on the conspiracy taking a number of needless risks (tampering of websites not being detected, covering all websites, letting there be no observable discrepency to those with their own airspace monitoring) compared to... not using a plane in the first place.

The plane is unnecessary, and requires multiple additional steps not identified by the author, and still doesn't deliver a unique capability required to make the plot work.

Do you even need to hack any websites? Obviously transponders can be turned off, and if I were running a military and wanted to engage in covert ops using planes I'd think that the ability to spoof the transponder output might be a thing that I'd be interested in?

Do you even need to hack any websites? Obviously transponders can be turned off, and if I were running a military and wanted to engage in covert ops using planes I'd think that the ability to spoof the transponder output might be a thing that I'd be interested in?

If you're operating in 'how to run a conspiracy' mode, then any routine event that suddenly deviates from norms becomes an indicator of interest when looking back at specific periods of interest. For routine military flights that routinely have their transponders on, suddenly turning them off- or having verifiable mismatches between claimed trackers and other forms of observation- becomes an observable item of interest to anyone who's interested in looking in the data afterwards. To prevent such a discrepancy from occurring during what you know will be a time of interest- such as an alleged command-detonated mine explosion- you'd need to plan on how to affect the public record if you were committed to maintaining a relevant level of secrecy.

There is no evidence or even allegation of such an event occuring- suggesting either a hyper-capable cabal and surprisingly limited Russian attention, or that there wasn't such a manipulation at all- but then, if you were running a military covert operation, there's no reason to use a plane to deliver a sonar device in the first place. You could just use a boat, for a fraction of the cost and detection risk.

why bother with a flight as the delivery mechanism at all?

I'm not saying flight is even remotely the best option, just that depending on flight monitoring websites and assuming their contents are 100% reliable when governments with the ability to hack them are involved is just .. weird.

Nobody but conspiracy theorists would really care if a flight transponder service got hacked and for a day was giving wrong position for a whole bunch of aircraft.

No one except the Russians or the Chinese or any other interested polity or activist group, for whom hacking a transponder service would be an amazing amount of smoke that could support the claims that the Americans (or Brits, or whoever) blew up the pipeline. Especially since relevant parties might have their own regional air tracking picture- like, say, a anyone with an air defense network with over-the-horizon radars in the Baltic region- with which to identify the discrepancy.

The point here isn't that tracker sites are 100% accurate pictures of the sky. It's that air tracker sites offer ways to identify various attempts to circumvent air tracking, from turning off transponders during routine flights, comparing different transponder sites to identify discrepancies between sites, or comparing transponder sites with the nation's own air-defense networks to identify a discrepency, which could be noted in post-even analysis. The number of countries with overlapping interests in monitoring the baltic airspace includes NATO, non-NATO, and Russia itself.

It's thus notable that no one is alleging this sort of flight tracker tampering has occurred. Not the Russians- who have the most interest in supporting a claim against the US- but also not the author. The possiblity of website tampering has been raised to dismiss the noted time discrepancy which would undermine the story... but this is introducing a new level of unfalsifiable claims that put the onus on proving a negative (that the websites were not hacked, as opposed to that they were) on skeptics rather than apply occam's razor- that the author is just wrong, and the very flight they claimed supports their claims does not, in fact, support it, casting doubt on other parts of the story by consequence.

amazing amount of smoke that could support the claims that the Americans (or Brits) blew up the pipeline

Do you really think that Russians, even for a moment, doubt it was the Americans ? It's not a court of law. It was Americans, or some US puppet/satellite did it with american approval.

If some American LNG terminal or pipeline doesn't blow up due to Russian sabotage within the next five years, I'd be surprised.

Especially since relevant parties might have their own regional air tracking picture- like, say, a anyone with an air defense network with over-the-horizon radars in the Baltic region- with which to identify the discrepancy.

That's probably way beyond their competence and sophistication levels. E.g. wasn't NORAD recently caught with its pants down and spent next days flying expensive jets around and shooting down various small spy blimps ? Apparently, they tracked all these small blimps (there's even a NYT article now - the guy running the program also worked on Chinese stealth aircraft), but weren't paying attention to them because of overly aggressive filtering. Took a good look after civvies photographed the Montana balloon.

Kinda feels like that time Soviets had a Cessna land on the Red square..

But, I'm thinking this is the US - no one is going to resign or get canned. Nobody got canned for the OPM leak either, so..

Do you really think that Russians, even for a moment, doubt it was the Americans ? It's not a court of law. It was Americans, or some US puppet/satellite did it with american approval.

Evidence needed, particularly for the framing.

Whether the Russians believe it was an American puppet/satellite is irrelevant to whether it was an American puppet/satellite. This presupposes that the framing of puppet/satellite is accurate, which is a model that rejects or diminishes the autonomy of other actors to act without American approval or foreknowledge.

I am not the sort of cultural chauvenist that presumes the Americans are the most important factor in the decision-making of American allies.

That's probably way beyond their competence and sophistication levels. E.g. wasn't NORAD recently caught with its pants down and spent next days flying expensive jets around and shooting down various small spy blimps ?

If air-monitoring is way beyond competence and sophistication, then much more difficult categories to monitor- such as surface-vessel and submarines- are even further beyond, thus furthering the incentive to using them rather than methods where a lower-level of competence would allow detection.

This is trying to have it both ways- that the actors involved are simultaneously incredibly capable but also incompetent.

Apparently, they tracked all these small blimps (there's even a NYT article now - the guy running the program also worked on Chinese stealth aircraft), but weren't paying attention to them because of overly aggressive filtering. Took a good look after civvies photographed the Montana balloon.

This undermines the claim of the inability to track, as it shows that they were tracked, but not acted upon at the time, but upon revisiting the available data were able to identify the at-the-time overlooked data. As a model for the Baltic space, this would support the importance of not having aviation data available for re-looking if you were trying to do a secret operation.

This is the conspiratorial argument trying to have it both ways: the simultaneous claims of hypercompetence beyond realism but incompetence in in select areas as needed to sustain the conspiratorial claims.

This undermines the claim of the inability to track, as it shows that they were tracked, but not acted upon at the time,

So, the fact that US failed to act on what were likely spy blimps flying overhead for years undermines my claim that they'd be too incompetent to have a program that'd correlate flight radar data and actual radar data ?

Do I have it right ? The fact of demonstrated incompetence* undermines my claim of their incompetence?

*there's a statement by Mattis claiming they 'knew about the balloons' but didn't tell Trump because his reaction could've been 'too combative'. Honestly have no clue why airforce intercepting unmanned suspicious manmade objects would ever require presidential authorisation so it seems like bullshit.

Not like anyone's getting hurt, so why even ask ?

More comments

People were just guessing based on their priors

I did not guess based on my priors, I learned about all the instances in which US officials and presidents opposed, sanctioned, and threatened to stop the pipelines:

  • Obama administration opposed the pipeline

  • Trump administration sanctioned any company doing work on the pipeline

  • Biden administration made opposition to the pipeline a top priority

  • Biden said he was "determined to do whatever I can to prevent"

  • Nuland said "If Russia invades, one way or another, Nord Stream 2 Will. Not. Move. Forward."

  • Biden said "If Russia invades…then there will be no longer a Nord Stream 2. We will bring an end to it." and after being questioned "I promise you, we will be able to do that."

  • After the attack Blinked said the bombing was a "tremendous opportunity to once and for all remove the dependence on Russian energy," and "offers tremendous strategic opportunity for years to come."

  • Nuland said "Senator Cruz, like you, I am, and I think the administration is, very gratified to know that Nord Stream 2 is now, as you like to say, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea."

How would this not suggest a very strong motive?

I agree that the US certainly didn't like the pipeline, because it correctly grasped the dangers of dependency on Russian gas. A lot of the pro-Russia accounts like to treat Biden's "we will put an end to it" statement as an ominous threat or smoking gun, when it was actually referring to a secret deal where Biden agreed to remove sanctions on NS2 if Germany agreed to end the pipeline if Russia invaded.

You're selectively gathering statements that fit your preconceived notion of what you think happened, ignoring evidence to the contrary, and then passing the resulting conclusion on as established fact. If someone wanted to do that in the opposite direction and say that Russia sabotaged their own pipeline, it would look like this.

For the record, I certainly think it's plausible that the US could have bombed the pipeline, either as part of the secret treaty with Germany (i.e. with Scholtz's knowledge), or the US might have looked the other way as one of the anti-Russian Eastern European countries did it (Poland, Ukraine, Baltics, or some combination thereof). If we ever get more convincing knowledge of who did the bombing, I personally doubt that the operation will look particularly close to what Hersh has described here.

You're selectively gathering statements that fit your preconceived notion of what you think happened, ignoring evidence to the contrary

What evidence to the contrary?

Well, "evidence" is probably the wrong word here as I said in my first post. It's referring to the vague statements and perceived motivations of the actors involved, like the stuff you posted 2 posts up.

What vague statements and perceived motivations am I "ignoring"?

What vague statements and perceived motivations am I "ignoring"?

What?

You told me:

You're selectively gathering statements that fit your preconceived notion of what you think happened, ignoring evidence to the contrary

Then changed evidence for "the vague statements and perceived motivations of the actors involved", so:

You're selectively gathering statements that fit your preconceived notion of what you think happened, ignoring evidence the vague statements and perceived motivations of the actors involved to the contrary

It was obvious to anyone paying attention, but now it's pretty much confirmed.

From the rules:

Don't attempt to build consensus or enforce ideological conformity.

"As everyone knows . . ."

"I'm sure you all agree that . . ."

We visit this site specifically because we don't all agree, and regardless of how universal you believe knowledge is, I guarantee someone doesn't know it yet. Humans are bad at disagreeing with each other, and starting out from an assumption of agreement is a great way to quash disagreement. It's a nice rhetorical trick in some situations, but it's against what we're trying to accomplish here.

Avoid this kind of thing in the future, please.

I was not trying to build consensus: "anyone paying attention" is not "everyone", it could very well be less than 1% of the people, that's not consensus in the least. And very well could accommodate 99% of the people that as you say "doesn't know it yet".

Yeah but the issue is how it is read - you might not have meant for it to, but it strongly suggests to the reader that they should agree with you if they consider themself someone who pays attention, which most people generally do.

If you are going to moderate on the basis of how some people might interpret something, then nobody is going be able to say anything controversial. Policing language stifles freedom of expression.

A basic principle of fruitful conversations is to be charitable with what the writer might have meant.

We moderate heavily on interpretation and tone, and this is very unlikely to change.

This is much worse than consensus building, because instead of moderately annoying some people who disagree with you, you are physically keeping out a lot people don't speak like you.

Ironically what you are doing is negating the effects of that rule. If 80% of the people that disagree with you speak differently than you, then you are using the consensus building rule to defend the remaining 20% of people who do speak like you like, but keeping out 80% of the people who don't.

In other words: you are keeping out most of the disagreeable people.

If your objective is to keep controversial topics out of the discussion, that's precisely the way to do it.

I disagree, sorry. The point of the community is to "be a working discussion ground for people who may hold dramatically different beliefs", not to accept the largest possible percentage of people, and in my experience, people being rude about their beliefs tends to drive out people who oppose those beliefs. I haven't seen a counterexample to this.

Hersh is 85 years old and did go a bit into conspiracy theories:

https://www.vox.com/2015/5/11/8584473/seymour-hersh-osama-bin-laden

The problem with his sources is not anonymity, but that it is singular: He only has one source. Rumors need at least to be double-sourced before they are print worthy.

I don't trust Vox one bit. All I've seen from them is lies. They only push the official narrative. Always.

Those reports have had little proof

See, I know in the case of Syria that's not true. So yet another lie to add to the list.

Well, this seems relevant to copy-paste.

https://www.themotte.org/post/349/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/63475?context=8#context

Overall, not impressed or compelled by the claims. People have already noted the singular anonymous source claiming, in an era where anonymous sourcing has been as disreputable as ever, but there are other elements that raise eyebrows.

-The claim it was done by the pure navy, as opposed to special forces, to avoid Congressional oversight really suggests someone who is not familiar with the other forms of oversight- and security vulnerabilities- of American military branches. There's a reason that the US black projects generally don't operate from the conventional forces, but in separate elements.

-The mind-reading/framing of motives is projection, or at least certainly not how the western military-security types would view items. I've yet to meet an American in a serious position of government responsibility who frames concerns over Nordstream in terms as abstract as 'threat to western dominance,' as opposed to the more concrete concerns of 'energy blackmail' or 'gas turnoffs.' This is arguing by connotation and pejorative rather than actual positions. If this is the author, that's on him, but if it's from the source, that's indicative.

-The discussion on the German political situation in May 21 is missing some rather significant context- such as the points that Merkel had just retired and there was a multi-month German political paralysis as the government formation negotiations were ongoing, the Russian military buildup adjacent to Ukraine had already started, the Belarusian migration crisis and Russian gas supply slowdown was already starting. The last three are generally now seen as pre-invasion shaping efforts by the Russian government before the invasion- which we know that the Biden administration was aware / observing in 2021. Instead of 'making a concession he knows will be invalidated', however, the author frames the motive as Biden's internal political floundering to war-criticisms.

-The 'planning' meeting that rests solely on the anonymous source is, ahem, silly. Just reverse the sentence order of the paragraph to see how so-

The CIA argued that whatever was done, it would have to be covert. Everyone involved understood the stakes. “This is not kiddie stuff,” the source said. If the attack were traceable to the United States, “It’s an act of war.” - The Navy proposed using a newly commissioned submarine to assault the pipeline directly. The Air Force discussed dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely.

The proposed plans, as described, don't pass muster in the context of their own paragraph, let alone broader realism. For one, submarines don't "assault". That's the sort of language of someone larping military insight. Similarly, the airforce plan of 'bombs with delayed fuses' makes no sense. Aircraft are incredibly visible, so you'd be guaranteeing a record trail, and either the aircraft would have to bomb land-based targets- which is to say, where timed fuse bombs would be found by the Germans in Germany- or a sea target. Now, this may surprise, but dropping bombs from a bomber entails the bomb hitting with terminal velocity. When very small things hit very big bodies of water at very high speeds, they do not penetrate and then become precision submersibles, they go splat.

This is something deserving of /r/credibledefense, but not credibility inspiring.

-The argument about no longer being a covert option because of the Biden Administration's public statements on Nordstream are nonsense.

"According to the source, some of the senior officials of the CIA determined that blowing up the pipeline “no longer could be considered a covert option because the President just announced that we knew how to do it.”"

This is a red flag for credibility. Covert options aren't covert because you have a known capability, but rather the secrecy. When we read declassified / released examples of covert operations, they almost always involve known capabilities of the actors. It's the who/when/if they are actually doing it that's the secret item. This objection is just about the one part that wouldn't matter, precisely because the Navy diving programs are openly acknoweldged capabilities.

-The whole Norway angle is just comedic. The narrative flops between the need for operational and legal secrecy as needed, without actually explaining why informing the Norwegians is necessary to carry out the operation... except to tell the Americans, who have been reviewing the problem for months, where to hit the pipe. The operational simultaneously needs to be secret, but also incredibly expansive in people and organizations involved.

-The timeline is also all over the place. Biden is alleged to have committed to planning the attack on the pipeline as a result of domestic political pressure before the war, but with target selection only occuring in March after engagement with a foreign nation, with the exact timing being... one of the most observed military maneuverings in the region for the year. Except, now with an even later bomb-on-command requirement, late in the process... which indicates they didn't have a time intended to blow it up originally, even as they were engaging the Norwegians to place it.

And- despite all the effort in creating a command-detonated timing... no reason for the timing is apparent. The article tries to go with a citation to imply it had to be done eventually, but there's a roughly 3 month gap between the alleged emplacement and alleged trigger.

-The argument on Russian mine-detection technology is getting into the military spy-fiction, and not the good kind. Tom Clancy was at least good at not just hand-waving technology. You don't get to just allege that the Russians built an entire undersea surveillance network along the Nordstream pipeline to justify the Norwegians as the only people who can counteract it with their inherent anti-Russian traits.

-The regular appeals to the 1970s is less relevant and more argument by historical innuendo. This is a normal element of conspiracy building, to break down temporal relevance and start building connections between unconnected things while also obscuring temporal and contextual relevant information. This isn't the first part of the article to do this, but it's reocurring enough to note, especially since the 1970s Church hearings drove very significant changes in the American intelligence community... changes that are being implicitly covered over by the appeal to the 70s for narrative continuity.

-The air-dropped sonar bouy is yet another red flag. You could get a better engineer to discuss the dynamics of sound propagation through water, but the real item is the fixation on dropping it out of an aircraft.

There is literally no reason to use an aircraft to drop a sonar bouy if you're trying to have a secret signal. Aircraft are easily observable on a number of sensors or by regional naval traffic. Even if your broadcast device weren't detected by any/all systems in the broader area at the moment it signals- and remember the Norwegians are being involved on the basis of a Russian surveillance system for underwater threats, ie. sound-based detection- the aircraft flight for recote detoation would be easily observable...

...and unnecessary, because you could just sail a boat and drop it over the edge. Boats are far, far harder to monitor for unusual activity than aircraft.

I could go on, but that's kind of enough. There are a number of things in this story that are meant to sound vaguely informed and insightful, but with a pretty clear lack of understanding of the material or the alternatives. The way this is written, this is less written by someone who actually knows how governments work and reads far more like being written for the sort of people who don't.

Really, it's targeting ignorance with a hope of shaping your views without remembering how they were shaped. It hopes you don't remember that it's all based on a single anonymous source, that no motivation is provided for the source providing all this information, that you won't remember the argument by connotations in rhetorical lines not used by the people it claims to reflect the positions of, that you won't dwell on the communication role/purpose of the various time-skips in the narrative, or the omissions of 2021 and awkward time gaps, the mechanical alternative methods, and so on.

Someone else can validate that the last part was written before your post, and was not written with you in mind.

All told, I do not find it credible, and would lower my judgement of someone who found it compelling.

Solid criticism, however, if you bend the terminology a little, 'bombing' the pipeline from a high flying plane would've been possible, although perhaps risky because who knows how good the resolution of air traffic and air defense radars in the area is.

US recently developed air-deployable versions of the mk 48 torpedo. These glide down to just above the surface and then launch a homing torpedo that could just get 'lost' and accidentaly spoon itself against a pipeline like that mine-clearing charge they found cosied up against Nord Stream in 2015 or so.

Solid criticism, however, if you bend the terminology a little, 'bombing' the pipeline from a high flying plane would've been possible,

This is what I meant by the writing being written for people who don't actually understand what's being discussed.

Bombing the pipeline is not possible from a high-flying plane, because when you drop an object out of a high-flying plane and it hits the water at terminal velocity, it crumples. This is flawed on a conceptual level, like proposing a small child 'aim for the water' when jumping out of a plane without a parachute because water is softer than land. At terminal velocities, hitting water is like hitting concrete.

This is the entire reason that the aviation aircraft for anti-submarine warfare are low and slow... and typically dropping things off with parachute, such as sonar pods. But the advantage of aircraft in these situation is their speed on getting to an area to drop items, not their precision. If you're not in a time-sensitive context, such as a pre-meditated emplacement, there's zero advantage to not just dropping something off the side of a boat.

although perhaps risky because who knows how good the resolution of air traffic and air defense radars in the area is.

Plenty of people. This is the primary naval / aerial conflict zone of a Russia-NATO baltic scenario. The presumption of air monitoring has itself been a regular argument by those who insisted the US must be responsible by virtue of anyone else would have been detected, and is a primary reason why a boat-based mission has been the most probable form of any deliberate sabotage.

US recently developed air-deployable versions of the mk 48 torpedo. These glide down to just above the surface and then launch a homing torpedo that could just get 'lost' and accidentaly spoon itself against a pipeline like that mine-clearing charge they found cosied up against Nord Stream in 2015 or so.

As a deliberate means of targetting the pipeline, with ironic quotes around 'lost'? No, because that's not how these things work on a technical level. This is in the 'making stuff up that sounds plausible to those who don't know better' territory.

Homing torpedoes do not home by magic, they home off of sound- specifically ship or submarine sound profiles- whereas the inactive nordstream wouldn't even had the sound of moving gas. The mk 48, according to wiki, does have wire-guidance capabilities, but this isn't usable with aircraft due to the line breaks. There is no GPS navigation like can be done to guide drones to specific grid coordinates because GPS does not work underwater. There are ways for sound-based navigation underwater... but the mk 48 isn't designed for that sort of navigation, and the thing about sound-based navigation underwater is that anyone can hear it, and yet no one has alleged it in this context. Even as parts of this conspiracy are based around the presence of russian underwater surveillance systems, ie acoustic sensors. Additionally, for a deliberately placed device to 'cosie' itself up to the pipeline, it needs underwater maneuver capabilities beyond forward guidance. Torpedoes are generally good at moving forward, and not very well known for moving sidewise and backwards.

And- to return to why it's really, really stupid- there's no need for the airforce to deliver a mk 48 by air. The mk 48 is a submarine-launched torpedo. Even if you invented all the technical solutions, if you were going to try and torpedo the nordstream, you could just send a submarine to deliver it instead. You could use wires for for guiding the torpedo, you could use the submarine's own navigation systems to get close to the target, you wouldn't need to risk any sort of air or surface-monitoring, and there would be no need to alert any foreign partner that you were doing an operation near the nordstream pipeline or bring in people to the conspiracy.

But that would make too much sense and would ruin the conspiracy... for the sort of people who understand why the proposal doesn't make sense. Hence the point of the article being written for people who wouldn't know when it was talking nonsense.

Bombing the pipeline is not possible from a high-flying plane,

You are surely aware of glide bombs and such? There's nothing preventing attaching such to a torpedo to allow high deployment. There were likely parachute systems for torpedo deployment.

the mk 48 is a submarine-launched torpedo. Even if you invented all the technical solutions, if you were going to try and torpedo the nordstream, you could just send a submarine to deliver it instead

I was impressed with your criticism, but are you really saying using a submarine, in a very shallow sea the Russians are reportedly monitoring very closely is such a good idea ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Sea#/media/File:Baltic_drainage_basins_(catchment_area).svg

Baltic Sea is very, very shallow. It's really not a place where large submarines, such as those that have torpedoes can be sneaky.

Torpedoes are generally good at moving forward, and not very well known for moving sidewise and backwards.

A pipeline is a line. Parking a torpedo next to a pipeline isn't as hard as getting it to a precise destination. Align with the pipeline side, slowly descend, sink ..

with ironic quotes around 'lost'?

That's the official explanation of why a explosive single use mine clearing ROV ended up lodged under a Nord Stream pipeline.

It got lost during a baltic training exercise and just, through sheer coincidence, ended up under a piece of infrastructure Americans just hate.

You are surely aware of glide bombs and such? There's nothing preventing attaching such to a torpedo to allow high deployment. There were likely parachute systems for torpedo deployment.

This is not only conflating flight profiles, but the navigation implications. The thing about parachute systems is that they're subject to wind drift- which means you're now dropping a torpedo, which can't GPS navigate, to an unknowable GPS grid coordinate, which means that even if you added on blind-navigation systems like gyroscopes that track progression from known points, they wouldn't work because you wouldn't know where you start.

Whereas this problem would be lesser if you flew from a low and slow altitude- to minimize coordinate drift- or just did a non-flight mechanism, like using a boat.

This is really basic capability mismatch that shouldn't be suggested by a senior airforce adviser to the White House.

I was impressed with your criticism, but are you really saying using a submarine, in a very shallow sea the Russians are reportedly monitoring very closely is such a good idea ?

Compared to using an aircraft? Yes. An aircraft is infinitely easier to monitor and track.

Setting aside the the Russian monitoring capability at that part of the baltic is an allegation unsupported by other parts of the narrative (such as the use of a sonar device as a command detonator- this is exactly the sort of signal underwater detection systems would detect), the reason submarines have difficulty in shallower waters is the vulnerability to active sound systems (ie. sonar).

Baltic Sea is very, very shallow. It's really not a place where large submarines, such as those that have torpedoes can be sneaky.

Who on earth told you that, but not the Russians and the NATO countries that have invested in submarine capabilities for the region for decades?

A pipeline is a line. Parking a torpedo next to a pipeline isn't as hard as getting it to a precise destination. Align with the pipeline side, slowly descend, sink ..

Again, this isn't how offensive torpedoes work on a technical level. There is no control system to do this, or the mechanical means to know when it is 'aligned' and 'slowly descend.'

This comes back to not knowing the technical capabilities of what's being involved.

with ironic quotes around 'lost'?

That's the official explanation of why a explosive single use mine clearing ROV ended up lodged under a Nord Stream pipeline.

It got lost during a baltic training exercise and just, through sheer coincidence, ended up under a piece of infrastructure Americans just hate.

If you accept that drift occurred without intent, then it wasn't deliberately placed for the purpose of ending up there, and relying on drift is not credible because there was no plan. Chance events do happen and things that sink do go about the the sea floor until they get stuck. If you reject the premise that it resulted there without deliberate intent, there's no reason to believe it drifted there as opposed to deliberately being placed.

So which is it? You can't have it both ways, that it both drifted and it was deliberate for it to drift exactly there.

Again, this isn't how offensive torpedoes work on a technical level. There is no control system to do this, or the mechanical means to know when it is 'aligned' and 'slowly descend.'

You're telling me torpedos have no internal navigation or sense of direction, at all ? That they don't have a depth sensor ?

They likely can't control their buoyancy, but they can descend or ascend at will while moving forward.

The thing about parachute systems is that they're subject to wind drift- which means you're now dropping a torpedo, which can't GPS navigate, to an unknowable GPS grid coordinat

Torpedos can probably tolerate significant g-forces, so late deployment of parachutes would mean its eventual position would be in a very small area, well within its possible range.

Who on earth told you that, but not the Russians and the NATO countries that have invested in submarine capabilities for the region for decades?

What 'submarine' capabilities ? Russians build some submarines in Petrograd, but they barely have a naval base there.

They're certainly not going to fool around with submarines there a year after Americans openly declared they can detect submerged subs by their wake even if they're ~200m down. Baltic is barely 60m deep mostly, it's as unsafe place for submarines as you can imagine.

@felipec has given a counter-argument here

https://www.themotte.org/post/349/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/64225?context=8#context

Anonymous sources and a lack of corroboration. I think it's plausible, but this article shouldn't shift your belief much.

Also, previously discussed here.

It didn't shift my belief much. But it's clear who was the one who benefited the most, and who has being against it, sanctioned, and threatened to shut it down over and over.

I've put more information here.


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