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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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....an internationally acclaimed piece of contemporary German art (something I've previously claimed barely exists, to my chargin)

This depends on your idiosyncratic personal preferences about what counts as art, meaningful, or beautiful. As far as I'm concerned, Germany contains arguable the world's premier center for producing beauty and meaning. I personally think it's crazy to judge a country producing ideas like these as not producing internationally acclaimed contemporary art just on the basis of video games, paintings, or music (even this example is questionable since this German produces quite a bit of internationally acclaimed music).

This is the general problem with basing your morality too heavily aesthetic preferences. These vary too much from person to person, are really hard to reconcile, and therefore produce unresolvable differences in judging which places are successful/which policies work/etc. It just leads to an all-against-all war between 100,000,000 orthogonal value systems.

Hans Zimmer is German, but he is one of the last living (true) German Jews, so not really what Dase is talking about.

I don't think I understand. Can you explain why that's a relevant difference instead of just no-true-Scottsmanning? Whatever the super fine details of the exact specific type of German he is, if you want to follow the tradition of dramatic, operatic German music like Wagner to the modern day, Hans Zimmer is probably the best example.