This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
The latest stupid culture war news: The notorious Good Good golf advertisement. Featuring a country club golf gentleman (fine member of high society) having a manic episode, so excited to try overpriced "luxury" slop, he shoves a lady to the ground. Instead of calling the police, the other players just look on; maybe he's the owner, you know the type, with so much money and so little financial or social awareness that he'd even waste it on, random example, a "Quantum Triple Diamond Driver".
I don't fault lefties for boycotting Good Good, coercing them to retract the ad and apologize. Because they should do it to every commercial: I want every non-monopoly with aggressive advertising to be given this (or the Bud Light post trans ad) treatment, until public and online spaces look even better than São Paulo, Lancy Geneva, and Maine (where billboards are outlawed). At least this ad tries to not be boring and obnoxious; I actually think it's somewhere in the top 1% I see and hear (although not a compliment), thankfully rarely anymore thanks to uBlock Origin, SponsorBlock, and generally avoiding software whose primary function is ad delivery.
And this includes invasive tracking. Recently Twitter sent C&Ds to Nitter and XCancel. This follows Reddit tightening old.reddit and Facebook/Instagram have always been locked down. Thankfully there are always alternatives, right now
https://twitterwebviewer.comhttps://nitter.kareem.one for Twitter, https://redlib.catsarch.com for Reddit, and https://inviziogram.com/ for Instagram - but it's annoying and contributes to link rot. This is your regularly-scheduled reminder to quit Twitter and the other brainrot social media, and replace them with more productive activities, like maybe, partaking in these "sophisticated" forum discussions on theMotte.I have little to contribute other than simple confusion? Did he have like a Joker face at some point?
How is this boycott worthy, its the most boring, mediocre, thing I've seen since I glimpsed a few seconds of the Super Bowl half time show while refilling my chips and dip.
It is a stupid ad. There are ways to make ads like this that are funny, but this isn't funny. It's not even particularly interesting - so it's some new golf club? Yeah, and?
Boycott is definitely a storm in a teacup, it's not worth it and is probably giving the product more publicity than it would have gotten without it.
More options
Context Copy link
I showed it to my wife, who golfs.
Her reaction was the same, she didn't think anything of the ad.
I'll agree with some of the people below, it seems like rumours of the death of "woke 1" have been greatly exaggerated
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I finally saw it and uhhh, it's kinda of a bad ad. Like why is it so creepy? I feel like I don't want buy that driver. Isn't there a quote like "good marketing is selling the product, great marketing is selling how it feels to have the product". I think the general feeling for owning sporting goods should be badass, cool, exhilarating, inspiring, motivating, maybe even competitive etc. Not whatever that was. I then did an exercise of how I would feel if it was a man that was shoved, also kinda creepy and machismo violence. It wasn't a warning out of friendliness or protectiveness, but just feels threatening. Either way, I don't think that was a good ad.
I went and find the bud light trans ad. It's just kinda cringe? Reminds me of the celebrities in Covid doing the Imagine song.
Maybe the woke can successfully bring back wife beating like they did racism.
I was wrongly remember a Nixons tape quote where he said the Irish drink and beat their wives, but I guess the official version was they can’t drink and get mean.
Now I think we’ve stamped out completely domestic violence within the wokes in-group and it’s only in minority groups.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It's a stark reminder that cancel culture is not dead. Your post doesn't walk through all of the fallout from this ad which was posted briefly and deleted quickly. But every new day is bringing more fallout to the brand from various partnerships:
So much for the "Woke 1.0 was stupid we went too far" conventional wisdom, it seems it never left. All the more surprising the hysteria exploded within golf, a right-coded subculture.
The hysterical reaction to that ad shows why gender equality is impossible. Good Good was obviously not trying to portray domestic violence but the opposite: Alexis the girl hanging out with a group of guys as one of them- a friend and a colleague, participating in a dumb skit to promote a driver. The mob interpretation that this ad promotes "domestic violence" implies an inherent, sexually submissive role of Alexis in a polyandric circle or something. She can't roughhouse with the boys because she's a woman, it would be inherently sexually suggestive for her to do so. Whereas someone who truly believed in equality would not anticipate a problem with Alexis playing this part in the script.
There's another layer to this though, which is that much of the hate mob appears motivated by hatred for Good Good itself, a hatred that is in turn downstream from ressentiment towards the "country club" social organization, a resentment which also comes through directly in OP's post mockingly describing Garret as a "country club golf gentleman (fine member of high society)".
Ressentiment towards the Country Club Gentleman has also long been promoted in popular culture, producing endless films where the Country Club Gentleman is the villain, meant to be humiliated by the outsider protagonist who has no respect for the cultural tradition or decorum expected by these social institutions.
The primary driver of this backlash is ressentiment towards Good Good itself, for the crime of being White young-adults making money from filming golf YouTube videos.
What I don't understand (well, kind of) is why the "left" does so much damage here, but not to, say, GrubHub, whose pandemic ad I feel is 20x more offensive, insensitive to the most discriminated demographic.
I'm just alluding to how country club members pride themselves on being civilized and "cultured", in contrast to the barbaric violent poor, yet here we purportedly have one assaulting a woman because she reaches for his golf club. I don't have anything against the country club culture, but I think they regard themselves too highly, believing their exclusivity and luxury improves their character, while they ultimately pursue shiny things and creature comforts like the rest of us.
This is what I mean though. You don't see this ad as a member of the group participating in a promotional skit, you see her as a woman reaching for a golf club being assaulted. The bit was supposed to be a parody of Obsession for what that's worth.
I'm a Country Club man, my experience is it's especially males but also families enjoying themselves among like-minded people in a high-trust environment, which can be a breath of fresh air in many places. Often for making friends, networking professionally, etc. And of course it retains a White identity, even though I enjoy shooting the shit with the Jewish members as well. The Outsider seething of the country club is a much more notable phenomenon. The ressentiment is downstream from a mixture of class resentment and ethnic resentment, often blended together in cultural criticism such as Happy Gilmore, the most popular Golf film in the past 35 years at least (and yes I do like the film, in large part because it is deeper than slapstick).
With that said I absolutely have my own criticisms of the culture, but they aren't derived from seething about the archetype as an outsider and then elevating the antithesis of the archetype as some sort of good. That's ressentiment.
More options
Context Copy link
Do they actually believe this? Country clubs are surely full of wealthy people, but do we really have much evidence of them being more arrogant and snobbish than other wealthy people?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Wait for it... wait for it....
Ah, there it is.
Do you agree popular culture and Hollywood has engaged in consistent criticism of the WASP Country Club? Are you just going to point and sputter or participate in the conversation?
Point and sputter? Heh. Dude, you'd be more sufferable if you had some self-awareness and a sense of humor about it. If you can't put hands on keyboard without making it about Jews, just own it.
Making fun of WASP Country Club has been a thing for as long as there have been WASP Country Clubs (i.e., pretentious rich people to make fun of). Dickens did it. Austen did it. Freaking Tolstoy (one of the few people with less of a sense of humor than you who comes to mind) did it. Wodehouse definitely did it. It was not invented by Jews.
There weren't country clubs when Austen or Dickens was writing - if you were rich enough to afford a country club then either you owned a rural estate, you had a relative who let you take trips to their estate, or you were saving up to buy an estate. I also don't think Austen was mocking the social norms of the English landed gentry except in the sense that the British sense of humour is incompatible with describing something in detail in an entirely unmocking way.
Wikipedia says that country clubs became a thing in the US around 1880. I don't think they are a thing in the UK - the term "country club" is more like an affectation used by some golf clubs.
A ‘country club’ is not in the country, generally. It’s located within metropolitan areas near the wealthy, high end suburbs, and it’s basically just a resort with no residential parts.
They're not in the country because the urbanized areas have come out to meet them.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Can you elaborate on your argument? I've read Dickens but the mockery of the WASP country club that has been transmitted to me, and everybody else who hates Good Good for representing a "country club golf gentleman (fine member of high society)" has not come from Dickens, or Austen, or Tolstoy, it has come from difference sources, like the one I posted.
My argument is that country clubs are the modern representation of stuffy rich people. Ordinary folk have always loved making fun of stuffy rich people. The stereotype that rich people are assholes and stories about rich people being bested by pliebs is not a modern Jewish invention to subvert the white race. That you need this explained is my point about your Jew-obsession. If a Jew does anything, anywhere, it doesn't matter why he did it or that other people do it too, in your world he did it for nefarious Jew reasons. Story written by a Jew? There's an anti-white message somewhere. Film featuring a Jewish comedian? It's anti-white. No matter how tortured the interpretation, you'll find some anti-goy propaganda somewhere. In this case, there weren't even any Jews involved AFAIK, so you had to reach for a totally unrelated work that happened to have a Jew in it.
MadMonzer is right, and I'd go further, the authors you're citing aren't one tradition.
Austen and Wodehouse were mocking from the inside. Austen was inside the gentry's world, writing for people who knew its rules and her targets are the Mr. Collinses who play the game badly, not the game. Bertie Wooster is affectionate self-parody. The jokes land because the audience knows the rules.
"Stuffy" is the view from outside. If you don't know why the norms exist, all you see is the fence. You know you're outside it, but not what it's for or that it was never built with you in mind. The norms had a purpose, elaborate decorum takes years to fake, it screened for people shaped by institution, when business ran on reputation and a handshake. Understatement, discretion, not talking about money, these keep a small closed world functional across fifty-year relationships. The same code is also a moat against new money.
The insider satire says "this person is playing our game badly." The slobs-vs-snobs stuff says "the game is fake and the players are frauds." Dickens does some of the latter; Austen and Wodehouse mostly don't. Mocking the country club as presumptively illegitimate isn't a continuation of Austen. It's throwing stones from the outside from the 'money can't buy class' set.
That said I'd never seen nor heard of Good Good, it seemed like poor improv or sketch comedy to me. Are we supposed to desire the possessed driver? Is it like the ring from LotR? It didn't make me want to try the driver or see any of their other work. Perhaps someone could like the best example of their work.
Oh, absolutely not. My point wasn't that Austen and Tolstoy and Wodehouse were writing the same thing (I deliberately chose some very unlike authors) - my point was that SS is trying to gesture at a particular theme in fiction being a nefarious Jewish anti-white agenda (even if it's non-Jews doing it, they're only doing it because of Da Joos), and I'm saying it is none of those things. Even if you distinguish between "mocking from the inside" from "mocking from the outside," Jews are not the ones who began the trend of mocking from the outside, and outsiders throwing stones at a structure they consider illegitimate is not a uniquely Jewish (or woke, or anti-white) phenomenon.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Advertising at least has a use. I'd prefer banning Good Good, as they have no use. It's the golf version of bad YouTube clickbait, with videos along the lines of "Can I Break 100 Using Only a Pool Cue?" and "Can I Beat Lee Westwood If His Feet Are Encased in Concrete?"
That's a bit unfair, please watch this clip and tell me it's not good content. That's a feat > 99.9% of golfers will never accomplish, and it was accomplished on high-quality film with different angles in an energetic setting. What people hate is the youthful vigor and playfulness. Granted, that is probably the best clip of the entire brand but if you golf you will know this whole segment is entertaining and genuinely impressive, with Garrett himself predicting a hole-in-one on a Par 4.
The Good Good hate doesn't make sense because if you don't resonate with it just don't watch it. I haven't watched it since Grant and Micah left, but we should all look for an explanation for why so many people hate young guys making a living off of filming golf.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don't get why it's a big deal. It's a play on the horror movie trope where people are drawn to evil objects that possess them and stuff. I guess if he was pushing a man nobody would care, reddit will be reddit.
But you actually got the characters mixed up. The owner of the driver pushes the woman away, telling her not to touch it. Then another different man tries to touch the driver, the owner tries to stop him as well but is unable to, and it's shown that the second man is possessed by the item. It's kind of a humorous reversal, the first man is made to just be an overprotective asshole at the beginning, but then it's revealed that touching the driver is dangerous, and he was partly doing it to protect her from its effects.
The only continuity gap is how the owner manages to retain his sanity while the driver causes issues for everyone else who touches it.
Thanks for posting this. I had to watch the commercial a couple times to kind of figure it out and I still was a bit confused until I saw your explanation.
Anyway, to answer your question, I would guess the problems are as follows:
(1) the commercial depicts a man engaging in violence towards a woman.
(2) the commercial depicts a man's agenda prevailing over that of a woman (i.e. she wants to try the golf club; he doesn't want her to try it)
(3) the commercial doesn't have the obligatory token black in it somewhere.
I think (3) is a bigger problem than it seems on the surface. Including a token black in a commercial is a way of demonstrating your fealty to the Church of Woke.
As far as (1) goes, here's a thought experiment: Imagine if the commercial showed a man shoving a child in the same way. You would find it objectionable, right? Ok, well feminists (and therefore progressives) see women as being entitled to the special protections our society gives to children. Or to put it another way, progressives see women as children, but only when it serves their agenda.
And (2) reflects a long-standing unwritten rule: In a commercial, when there is a conflict between a man and a woman, the woman should prevail in the end. In the past, I have seen the occasional beer commercial which violates this rule, but even that I haven't seen in a while.
Edit: I think an additional problem is that the commercial is difficult to understand. I think that wokies tend to judge first and ask questions later, so to speak. I have seen this sort of thing happen multiple times. For example, a person is making fun of racism; says something which is a caricature of what a racist might say; and the person gets attacked by wokies for uttering something racist.
Run the same experiment, but have him shove an elderly man, and it's also extremely objectionable. Similarly where where he shoves his buddy who has a physical disability. Or even shoves a buff wounded vet walking with a cane.
This is just society having a valid norm against a bigger, stronger person violently bullying a smaller person, or "picking on the weaker man" as they used to call it.
More options
Context Copy link
I don't think it excuses violence against women. Finding a man hitting a woman funny is an unforgiveable sin, unless it is part of a kinky sex thing.
I'm not sure "excuse" is the right word, since (in my opinion) it's not a matter of deciding whether, on balance, whether something is right or wrong; justified or unjustified; etc. Rather, in the mind of the wokie, it's a matter of weighing whether something is a viable target for an outrage campaign. So for example, there is a significant problem with honor killings of women in certain cultures. Progressives (which includes feminists) don't make a big issue out of this. It's not a question of whether these honor killings are excusable, but rather what to do about them in light of the realities of coalition politics.
From that perspective, it's reasonable to ask whether the reaction to this commercial would have been the same had a token black been included. Or better yet, if the golfing party had included a multi-racial cast of characters. I don't know if that would have been enough to tip the scales, but I'm pretty sure it would have been a factor.
More options
Context Copy link
Ah, I think I know who they can get in touch with for a revised, woke-approved, version of the commercial.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Online, I'm with you, but in public physical spaces, I disagree so much. As a Red Sox fan, I remember when the Green Monster at Fenway Park didn't have ads in the 90s and early 00s (in contrast to sometime before that and before my era, when it was plastered with ads), until the new owners decided to plaster it with ads yet again. A high proportion of fans were against it on the basis that it would uglify this holy site, but almost immediately after it happened, I absolutely loved the results and thought it looked far more natural with all the ads (aside: same for the Monster seats; before that, the Green Monster only had netting above the wall). Since then, I've come to appreciate the beauty that is added to things by advertisements that were motivated purely for commercial desires, and often - not always, but often - I feel like there's a real resource being wasted when I see some highly-visible wall or structure of some commercial or industrial building not being decorated with advertisement that could be generating revenue and having a 50/50 chance of helping out the company that's advertising.
I also learned recently that many Torii gates in Japan are sponsored by businesses and the Japanese characters written on their pillars are advertisements for those businesses, so they're roughly the equivalent of a "WALMART" or "DICK'S SPORTING GOODS" stamped on the gate, and learning this made me like these gates even more.
Sumos also get personal sponsorships and come out with garish but kinda contextually appropriate banners before their matches
More options
Context Copy link
Yeah a lot of in irl ads become iconic, for example the running man billboard in japan or just like times square. Though the majority of roadside billboards are just an eyesore.
I remember seeing a picture of some clueless tourist posing in front of toori gates in Japan and they were all sponsored by brothels and other unsavory businesses.
More options
Context Copy link
At least in principle, I feel exactly the opposite way!
Consider a billboard: it's basically taking up part my view of the sky, and potentially distracting me while I'm driving, for no benefit to me in most cases! (the exceptions being any case where it's
notinforming me about some product that I wouldn't otherwise hear about and would genuinely prefer to my other options) But an online banner, no matter how obnoxious or pointless to me personally, is at least paying some fraction of a cent towards the maintenance of a website that I chose to visit and probably want to keep running.In practice, though, I'd count your Fenway Park example as a private physical space, not a public one. And just like online, there the people who are providing us with something we want are getting paid for the ads they're showing us. I might have preferred a higher ticket price for a more ad-free experience, personally, but if they're not just giving me a plain green wall plus a higher ticket price to compensate then I'm probably outnumbered on that and it's overall good that they're catering to the majority instead of me.
That's exactly what I find so beautiful about such things. It's a functionally useless slab of metal put there ONLY for the purpose of stealing people's glances so that some other company can better extract money from those people. The amount of effort involved in getting all that metal and plastic and ink and etc. arranged in that way is far from trivial, and it's all in service of something that is basically wishful thinking on the part of the company, that it will have some marginal positive effect on the money they can extract from the public. It's a reflection of an immense amount of freedom and excess wealth in the society, which I find beautiful.
Yeah. Pompeii's collection of ads/graffiti arguably teaches modern archeologists just as much as the buildings themselves about the views, needs, wishes and messaging of their society.
More options
Context Copy link
I'm upvoting you not because you've convinced me, but because I love reading things I disagree with so strongly defended so eloquently. Cheers!
I suppose you're actually swaying me a little bit. Although I wouldn't say "freedom" must necessarily include the idea that property rights in real estate extend indefinitely above it, even that idea would often be better than the common NIMBY status quo, and finding a good balance in between the two is hard.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There's one more benefit the road trip benefit of a whole new source of letters when youre playing the alphabet game to pass the time. Flying J, QuikTrip and Zips are aways appreciated signs even it I never darken their door.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Static advertisements aren’t the worst (unlike animated) and may be better than nothing. But better than advertisements are murals commissioned to real artists whose goal isn’t to sell something to the lowest common denominator. I prefer those on walls and structures and imagine Fenway Park would look better with them too.
With the current class of people we have commissioning and painting murals, I'd rather take my chances with the advertisement. At least the ad probably won't be an ugly piece of socialist realism political propaganda glorifying some mass murderer. I'd much rather look at a pretty lady selling me cosmetics.
More options
Context Copy link
If the adverts were truly non-invasive and didn’t try hijacking my attention (or indeed the damn computer itself), I wouldn’t bother with an ad blocker at all. I believe in content creators and businesses collecting the revenue for my use of their services to perpetuate themselves, but the industry as a whole hasn’t progressed much relative to the speed to technological advancement.
Modern technology is about custom answers to individuals, not about “macro efficiency” in the old economic sense. Compare the differences between the subscription model for television and the advertising model. If you’re using television to advertise (which is the old model), you want the least common denominator program. You want the show that everybody watches so you can stick in the ad and show it to the largest amount of people. Today, you’re looking to get the next subscriber. You now want the show that “somebody” wants to watch, but it’s someone who doesn’t watch the shows you’ve already sold them. This is what gets you niche programming. Thats why streaming platforms constantly struggle to find “the next 12 people” who want “that next weird show.” Because if they show it to someone who’s already been captured by your advertising efforts, that’s 0 profit. From a productivity standpoint in economic statistics, that’s a complete disaster; because you’re putting large amounts of resources into the smallest audiences possible; not the largest audience possible. That just looks bad in stats.
More options
Context Copy link
What do you think about early 20th century ads painted on the sides of buildings? There’s been a concerted effort in my neck of the woods to restore these “ghost signs” and bring them back to their former glory. In one sense, it’s kind of stupid, since the businesses being advertised have mostly long since closed their doors. On the other hand, the hand-painted lettering is usually not unattractive.
More options
Context Copy link
I think there are certainly contexts where this is true. I'm skeptical about Fenway Park specifically; a mural that exists purely for beauty isn't out of the question in an MLB stadium, which are known to have similar things like fountains or statues or even aquariums which serve similar functions. But I think there's something especially beautiful about the way a stadium reflects its purpose - i.e. to generate profit for the owners via providing a space that people are willing to pay money to watch their local professional team play - that is missing in a mural that isn't in an advertisement. The mural could beautify the stadium and provide a more positive experience to the fan which compels them to be willing to pay more or to come more often, but a pretty piece of 2D art on a wall isn't generally something that baseball (or any sportsball) fans find that appealing about going to a baseball game, and so if it's there, it's almost definitely mostly motivated by some desire to make the park more beautiful to look at and experience, rather than the desire to get more people to be more willing to pay more money to come into the park. And, again, there's something beautiful to the park's visuals reflecting its purpose rather than reflecting some desire to show people a beautiful wall.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
It does work out nicely for all involved. I think that's partly because it's more tasteful that usual advertising, though. Just the name of the sponsor carved in a neat serif font. It's more like having "R. D. Williams Esq." carved on the wall than "Coca Cola: this is my flavour".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link