site banner

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 12, 2023

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.

10
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Was 1996 Alabama really THAT racist?

Something to keep in mind is that the book the movie was based on was written in the 80s and set some indeterminate ammount of time in the past.

I also suspect that there's a certain amount of "how Hollywood liberals imagine" the deep south vs "how it be" going on.

From watching the movie, there were a lot of clues (the fashion, the cars etc.) that it was not set in 1996. I would have guessed late 70's/early 80's (consistently with the publication date of the book).

John Grisham, the author of the book, is from Arkansas and Mississippi. He's not a Hollywood liberal.

That said, the description of the movie does sound like a Hollywood liberal adapted the book.

He's not a Hollywood liberal.

Not geographically, but his politics seem to be roughly standard Hollywood liberalism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Grisham#Political_activism

Opposing the death penalty, while also writing a sympathetic novel about black-on-white vigilante murder (race-swapping a real case) is also an amusing position.

His current political activism isn't super relevant to a book he wrote in 1989. Other plot points in the book that I think got removed from the Hollywood version:

  • This town elected a black sheriff who was respected by everyone.

  • The part of jury selection that was harmful wasn't that they were all white, but that they were white women.

At least based on my recollection of Grisham books from the 90's, I doubt he'd be taking the modern liberal position of "Fry Jose Alba".

https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/new-video-shows-girlfriend-stab-nyc-bodega-worker-after-confrontation-turned-deadly/3769959/

I doubt he'd be taking the modern liberal position of "Fry Jose Alba".

Who is saying that?

Left wing Soros prosecutors. Presumably the left wing voters who put them in office.

Screenplay by Akiva Goldsman from New York.

an infamous hack, even among hack Hollywood writers

A Beautiful Mind was okay, I guess.

I don't know anything about the production of the movie, but remember reading the book some time back in the late 90s / early 2000s because it was in a pile of cheap paper-backs and I was looking for something to read on a cross-country flight. I'm pretty sure I've caught bits of the movie on cable over the years but have never sat down and watched it start to finish. It would not surprise me at all to find out that Grisham wrote a story that was intended to harken back to the bad old days of "strange fruit" and the producers simply set it in [current year] out of laziness and because Hollywood.

I can say that FWIW Southern Alabama actually struck me as substantially less racist than California or anywhere in the northeast both when I was stationed there in the early 00s and when I went back there for work in the mid 10s.