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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34491 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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Britta Perry: a Culture War time capsule

One of the fun things about reading old books or watching old movies is how you can be reminded of the way society changes. Obviously this is a somewhat trite observation, but it doesn't really make it any less jarring when something very casually conflicts with the subtle messaging you get every day in the present. Community is one of my favourite TV shows; it ran from 2009-2015 which isn't that far in the past, but I saw a Reddit post the other day that made an interesting observation about the zeitgeist it represented and how quickly we've moved on from it.

The female lead of the series is Britta Perry (played by the wonderful Gillian Jacobs), and in the first dozenish or so episodes of the show she's very much a conventional sitcom love interest: responsible, compassionate, earnest, striver for social justice, the Better Eventual Half of our morally listless protagonist, etc. This of course was bland and boring, so the writers ended juking things up and turning her into a much more interesting character. Rather than being the noble (and unfunny) stock liberal progressive, she became the annoying and semi-incompetent stock liberal progressive. She continues to be smug and overbearing about the same subjects, but she's flipped as a killjoy instead of righteous.

And it's interesting to see what the writers of the time considered to be the most annoying tendencies of white, urban, female, bourgeois progressivism. Yes, of course she complains about the patriarchy, thinks all her media consumption is about making a statement, she has to work her pet causes into every conversation, and she hates cops. But she's also a crusader for civil liberties, a big fan of Julian Assange, outspoken in favour of free speech, and paranoid about government surveillance. Even her evangelical vegetarianism seems notably out of place in 2023.

And of course perhaps what's most glaringly obvious is the subjects she DOESN'T care about: there's barely a mention of race (except for once suggesting they include an Asian member for more diversity!), she famously cares more about animal cruelty than racism, and not only does she never dip her toe into anything resembling bisexuality or gender experimentation, she's even portrayed as mildly homophobic. Until the last episode there's nary a mention of transgender people except for the transfer dance being referred to as the "tranny dance" in season 1 (in 2009, any idea of transgender people being anything other than a punchline was not even dawning in the minds of progressive Hollywood writers).

So this was the stereotypical annoying liberal progressive circa 2010. No mentions of black bodies and trans spaces, a lot of worrying about civil liberties. I guess we never knew how good we had it. I'll leave you with a link to an illicit streaming website which is one of the few places you can watch one of the show's best episodes, which got erased from existence after George Floyd for the crime of adjacent-blackface and features annoying Britta at her best.

I was gonna make a top level but I guess this is already tangentially the topic.

According to the New Stateman, Russel Brand is now far-right?

Brand launched into a tinny rant that encompassed every right-wing signalling trope: the ghoulish mainstream media, the dishonest and untrustworthy pharmaceutical industry, the West’s shameful treatment of Julian Assange and “American hero” Edward Snowden, and the Covid drug Ivermectin. He then pivoted leftwards, and rounded off his angry sermon with an endorsement for, erm, Bernie Sanders.

Glenn Greenwald (Dailystormer darling // He might be a homosexual Jew, but Glenn Greenwald is a legend and a hero, and his recent piece ripping apart the hall monitor censorship beat of the mainstream media is the article of the year.) comments:

For as long as I can remember, those views - contempt for corporate media and Big Pharma, anger over mistreatment of "heroes" Assange and Snowden - were deeply associated with the Western left.

They're views I always held and still did. Now these are right-wing views? Evidently.

Is it now right-wing to signal distrust of Big Pharma, corporate media and opposing desert wars?

If you dislike Big Pharma e.g. because you think it promotes drugs that aid kids being trans, you are not going to find left allies. If you dislike Disney because you think it will make kids trans through acculturation, you're not going to find left allies.

So superficially the right is running away right now with a lot of the left's historical whipping boys, but if you dig deeper there's a throughline, a continuity.

This puts the left in awkward position, yes, feeling the need to defend some of these institutions by default but having to squeeze in, "but..but here's the real reason you should dislike X corporation!", trying to steal back that thunder.

Of course if you are very young leftist you're not particularly interested in stealing back that thunder. It was never your thunder to begin with. You care about different things. A lot of it seemingly representational and media-oriented.

As a leftist, I want pharma companies to be nationalized, so that trans kids can have easier access to medicine they may have financial issues getting at the moment. Same thing w/ the vaccine - the doctors who made the vaccine are not the issue, it's the assholes who want to charge for it. Same thing w/ Disney - the problem with Disney is it's power through copyright and buying up other companies, not it's social views.

It's not really an argumentative problem for leftists, since most "leftists" were always fine with vaccines and also fine with minority representation in culture. It's some uneasy allies, but hey, we've team up with worse before to beat reactionaries.

I can't find the source for this, as the internet is dead and all I can sniff out are the fumes of its rotten carcass, but back when I still listened to NPR I recall hearing one of their self-promoting bumpers using glowing language to inform me that they (and I am paraphrasing from memory) "give you not just the news, but the context of the story". I thank God for those practitioners of the dark arts who speak the quiet part out loud.

In America, political positions are often... mercurial, to say the least. The "facts" (a word I wouldn't have expected to lose so much meaning even a few years ago), such as they are, are immaterial. The purpose of these facts and their position in your given tribe's narrative, is what is truly important.

Near as I can tell these narratives now serve as a kind of post hoc justification for where and how our collective nannies must childproof our shared world; the Blues/Dems want things like absolute female liberation (including from the strictures imposed by external forces e.g. the function and purpose of the womb or any extant cultural understanding between the sexes), comprehensive public assistance, aggressive tax rates increasing exponentially by bracket, explicitly uncritical social mediation on topics of sexuality and family structure. Reds/Reps want things like universally available individual armament, enshrining the social mores of a previous generation, walling off educational institutions from social movements, a more generous taxation structure for high earners1.

The particulars shift across time as well, which can safely be atrributed to the constant influx of younger generations with their own inhereted versions of these positions, as well as their shiny new takes on such topics2.

Is it now right-wing to signal distrust of Big Pharma, corporate media and opposing desert wars?

Not exactly, but a principled position held consistently across time these days is interpreted as witchy behavior, at a minimum evidence of not being a REAL Scotsman. So, in practice, yes.

1These should by no means be considered comprehensive or precise lists, but the vagaries introduced by this fractious political pantheon are inexhaustible, and I am not.

2My cynicism and hard-earned paranoia wishes to point towards an occluded cabal pulling the strings, but there's little need when simple value drift will suffice.

"Philosophical consistency is not a tribal suicide pact," to remix a Bush era phrase.

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