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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35492 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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What mechanism led to the promulgation of ideas like "black girl magic" or that men should "shut up and listen"?

They seem like the result of fairly organic social phenomena to me, but I confess I had not heard of "black girl magic" until this comment.

  • -13

An organic phenomenon in circles of varying levels of progressiveness that is exported via mass media to circles that find it distinctly inorganic - because it's practically an alien signal from a foreign reality that doesn't reflect or align with theirs. And you may have noticed that a sizable part of our culture war is spilling-over resentment towards and reassesment of these memes; either due to being fed up with them to the point of dropping politeness or in some cases betrayed by what they feel were implicit lies sold through them.

Like, half (if not most!) of the argument around these issues is that critics find them largely inorganic and astroturfed! And all you can do is serially post strings of words amounting to:

"OK, but so what?"

"OK, but what could you even do?"

"OK, but like, doing anything would be coercive, no?"

You remind me of a friend who talks this way whenever we have a political discussion that trails into something he's either plainly uninterested in or (frankly) unable to seriously defend a pet position of his - his tack of course totally changing when, say, the conversation turns to Roe v Wade. He's a great guy, pretty sharp, makes a good debate partner to keep me on my toes, and so I look past that stuff.

This is just boring and low effort.

Caught in this quadruple system of interpellation as subjects, of subjection to the Subject, of universal recognition and of absolute guarantee, the subjects ‘work’, they ‘work by themselves’ in the vast majority of cases, with the exception of the ‘bad subjects’ who on occasion provoke the intervention of one of the detachments of the (Repressive) State Apparatus. But the vast majority of (good) subjects work all right ‘all by themselves’, i.e. by ideology (whose concrete forms are realized in the Ideological State Apparatuses). They are inserted into practices governed by the rituals of the ISAs. They ‘recognize’ the existing state of affairs (das Bestehende), that ‘it really is true that it is so and not otherwise’, and that they must be obedient to God, to their conscience, to the priest, to de Gaulle, to the boss, to the engineer, that thou shalt ‘love thy neighbour as thyself’, etc.

Their concrete, material behaviour is simply the inscription in life of the admirable words of the prayer: ‘Amen – So be it’.

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