site banner
PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   31438 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 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.

13
Bottom New Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Sorry to do two posts back to back, but the Fourth Circuit has dropped a steaming pile of dog shit on my front porch and I'm kind of mad about it. (Is that too heated? Honestly I feel like I'm soft pedaling it.)

Porter v. Board of Trustees of North Carolina State University is a case on academic freedom and speech by government employees. Stephen Porter was a tenured professor of education in the university's "higher ed" program. His statistical research on higher education has dealt at times with questions of faculty and student body demography. After complaining that

NC State’s diversity initiatives resulted in “abandoning rigorous methodological analysis in favor of results-driven work aimed at furthering a highly dogmatic view of ‘diversity,’ ‘equity,’ and ‘inclusion’”

he found himself removed from the higher ed program for being "insufficiently collegial." He sued. And now, barring a reversal by SCOTUS, he has lost. More from the article:

In the 2006 case Garcetti v. Ceballos, the Supreme Court held that when government employees speak “pursuant to their official duties, the employees are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline.” But, critically, Garcetti made an exception for faculty at public institutions engaged in “speech related to scholarship or teaching.”

The Fourth Circuit’s decision considerably narrows this exception, effectively placing faculty speech about shared institutional governance and decision-making beyond the First Amendment. The court reasoned that Porter did not speak as an academic, but rather “in his capacity as an employee,” concluding Porter’s speech “was not a product of his teaching or scholarship” and is, therefore, “unprotected.”

This analysis suggests that the Fourth Circuit has quite perplexingly decided that "intramural" speech does not qualify for the Garcetti academic exception. Essentially, in the Fourth Circuit, academic freedom apparently extends to lectures and publications, but not "when professors speak and write as citizens of the campus community and officers of an educational institution." This is an especially awkward position, however, when the professor in question teaches and researches higher education specifically. Imagine being free to make assertions about higher education policy in the classroom and in your writing, but not being free to repeat those things at a faculty meeting, or to university administrators! The author also notes that this may reflect a circuit split with the Ninth, which is good news for any planned appeal.

But the age of that split (the Ninth Circuit case was decided in 1976) also highlights how much the American Left has changed in the last 50 years, and how right-coded Free Speech has become--even, maybe the speech of tenured university professors (who are of course overwhelmingly left-identifying). As one commenter over at Brian Leiter's blog observes:

It seems to me that the dissent attends carefully and sensibly to the relevant facts but that the majority does not. On page 43, the dissent offers this explanation for the majority’s failure:

“My friends in the majority ... have developed a new ‘bad man’ theory of the law: identify the bad man; he loses. ... The majority’s threadbare analysis willfully abandons both our precedent and the facts in search of its desired result. ... that cynicism breaks new ground.”

A second commenter adds further context:

Curiously, the two judges in the majority (Wynn and Thacker) are Obama appointees, whereas the one judge in dissent (Richardson) is a Trump appointee. As the preceding comment observes, the argumentation in the dissenting opinion is far better than that in the majority opinion.

Leiter himself then weighs in on Richardson:

I see that Judge Richardson is a UChicago Law graduate (before my time), who clerked for Judge Posner.

Posner, of course, is the father of the Law and Economics movement, which is not universally embraced by conservative lawyers but is very often a right-coded jurisprudence. So here we have a flip from the stereotypical expectations, with leftist judges constraining the academic freedom of a tenured university professor (as well as government employee freedom of speech generally--they give a narrower interpretation than the conservative Supreme Court furnished in 2006!) and a right-wing judge dissenting.

Naturally, most analysis seems to agree that this is a results-oriented decision; the "real issue" is not academic freedom or freedom of speech at all, it's the total inviolability of the gospel of DEI. Porter committed a heresy, and got slapped down for it, and the high priests of the church of DEI confirmed his punishment. All other details are irrelevant. This does not mean Republicans are now going to be the champions of academic freedom, or that Democrats have abandoned that position. It's just pure, unadulterated who, whom, as the dissent seems to grasp.

I hate when judges add fuel to the cynical fires of "there is no principle, there is only power." I have seen judges choose principle over their preferred results. I know that something like reasoned objectivity is broadly achievable, if we value it. But it seems to be happening less and less, and certainly the forcefulness with which DEI has been rammed down our collective cultural throat seems best described as oppressive ideological totalitarianism.

Curiously, the two judges in the majority (Wynn and Thacker) are Obama appointees, whereas the one judge in dissent (Richardson) is a Trump appointee. As the preceding comment observes, the argumentation in the dissenting opinion is far better than that in the majority opinion.

I have to say, I do not find this curious. I have admitted previously to being legally unsophisticated and I remain so; in recent months, I've taken to reading more decisions than I had in the entirety of my life up to that point, and the experience has substantially shaped my view of left-leaning jurisprudence for the worse. There are, of course, decisions with sketchy logic running in either direction, but the number of times that I run into reasoning from left-leaning judges that aligns with that first comment you quote on the "bad man" theory of law is so, so much more frequent. Sotomayor and KBJ seem to have particular enthusiasm for explaining how a decision will have bad outcomes rather than focusing on whether it's, you know, legal and consistent with an ordinary reading of statute. For instances, [this Sotomayor dissent regarding Covid restrictions] or the recent KBJ perspectives on affirmative action. In contrast, Gorsuch seems the most likely of the justices to just read the text to mean what it literally means on ordinary reading.

Pretty sure the commenter doesn’t actually find it curious, either.

"when professors speak and write as citizens of the campus community and officers of an educational institution."

Hoist them on their own petards. Pass laws banning advocating for race-segregated graduations, student groups, "affinity" groups, or programs. When faculty complain, whoops, that's intramural speech seeking to racially-discriminate in violation of the Civil Rights Act and 14th Amendment; no "free speech" protection there.

They'll find some way to dodge it. Perhaps it's hate speech. Perhaps it makes people feel unsafe. They could invent a whole new legal doctrine specifically to target this, ignoring the contradiction with precedent.

OP's whole point is summed up in this statement from the dissent:

“My friends in the majority ... have developed a new ‘bad man’ theory of the law: identify the bad man; he loses. ... The majority’s threadbare analysis willfully abandons both our precedent and the facts in search of its desired result. ... that cynicism breaks new ground.”

It's a results oriented decision, not a principle-based one.

If DeSantis takes this decision as a green light to fire every CRT-spouting faculty member in the University of Florida system who has criticized their own university or the UF system, we'll get a more recent circuit split. Along, likely, with some very fancy footwork in the Fourth Circuit (which includes part of Florida) explaining why it's not OK when the other side does it (no, the Fourth Circuit does not include any of Florida, I think the source I was looking was describing Florida Circuit Courts).

Re public criticism, DeSantis might have a problem under Pickering. Though as I note above, the public employee speech cases are terrible, so who knows.

Pickering involved a letter written to a newspaper, not intramural speech. De Santis should only fire the university employees that argued for DEI programs in internal venues, not those that used the press.

Is that too heated?

If you have to ask, the answer is probably “yes.”

I am pretty skeptical of comments evaluating the quality of “argumentation.” At worst, it’s drawing one’s opponent as the Soyjak. At best, you’re still going to get wildly different interpretations. Compare our board after the AA and debt decisions: were the conservative justices extra-principled? Was Barrett, Kavanaugh, Kagan or Sotomayor a hack? Did Roberts sandbag as part of a devious liberal strategy?

The answer to all these questions is most likely “no,” but you can find each of them argued in the parent thread. Such is the risk of evaluating literal opinions. Our own debate is weak evidence.

Likewise, I don’t think the comments are great evidence that Wynn and Thacker are hacks. Leiter himself starts out on firmer ground, and I appreciate his analysis of Garcetti. The merits of this case do look pretty suspicious! I’m just…not ready to jump to accusations of hackery. Reading the tea leaves about right- or left/coded jurisprudence, or who clerked for whom, should be secondary to analysis of the actual opinions. Unfortunately, the FIRE links are broken, and I get a 404 when I try and evaluate the argumentation for myself.

Edit: found it.

Upon review, we affirm the dismissal because we find that Appellant has failed to allege a causal connection between the only communication that is arguably protected under the First Amendment and the alleged adverse employment action.

There were three points of contention. The court denies that two of them were protected, since they did not have political valence. For the third, a blog post, they argue that the timeline doesn’t line up, and the complaints of the firing process don’t focus on it. I think this amounts to saying Porter was enough of a dick to get fired even if he had been expressing the opposite political opinion. Is this true? Maybe. Is it chilling? Probably. Does it meet the “rigorous” standard? You know, I could be convinced.

Naturally, FIRE spins this as a “troubling” development and dismantling of Garcetti. Leiter already questioned that. Despite my preference for improved speech protections, I am loath to take FIRE as an unbiased source.

The problem is not that this case is results-oriented. It is that the entirety of the Court's jurisprudence on govt employee speech is awful. After all, in Garcetti itself, the Court held that a district attorney could be disciplined for complaining internally that he believed that police officers had lied on a search warrant affidavit. The Court held:

The controlling factor in Ceballos' case is that his expressions were made pursuant to his duties as a calendar deputy. See Brief for Respondent 4 ("Ceballos does not dispute that he prepared the memorandum `pursuant to his duties as a prosecutor'"). That consideration—the fact that Ceballos spoke as a prosecutor fulfilling a responsibility to advise his supervisor about how best to proceed with a pending case— distinguishes Ceballos' case from those in which the First Amendment provides protection against discipline. We hold that when public employees make statements pursuant to their official duties, the employees are not speaking as citizens for First Amendment purposes, and the Constitution does not insulate their communications from employer discipline.

And, I am a big fan of FIRE, but I am puzzled by their emphasis on the issue of whether the speech in this case was "related to scholarship or teaching", because even the dissent did not rely on that issue, but rather on the threshold question of whether he was speaking as a citizen on a matter of public concern, as opposed to speaking as an employee. In fact, the dissenting judge says: " I need not consider the scope of any exception for duties related to scholarship or teaching." (see dissent, fn 3).

Moreover, I am skeptical that things like speaking at a faculty meeting or sending an internal email is what Garcetti meant by "related to scholarship or teaching." (Note also that Garcetti did not actually create an exception for that speech, but rather left that question open. The Fourth Circuit, however, has said that the exception apples. See Adams v. Trustees of the Univ. of NC-Wilmington, 640 F. 3d 550 (4th Cir. 2011) ["The plain language of Garcetti thus explicitly left open the question of whether its principles apply in the academic genre where issues of "scholarship or teaching" are in play."]).

Edit: See this law review article for a discussion of terrible decisions arising out of Garcetti. The table of contents gives a sample:

A. Speech about Rank Corruption in Law Enforcement Not Protected Speech

B. Revealing a Leak in Law Enforcement Leads to Punishment Not Praise

C Fire Chiefs Revelations about Inadequate Staffing Lead to Termination

D. Teacher's Warning of Scabies Outbreak Not Protected Speech

E Teacher's Complaints of Falsifying Test Results Not Protected Speech

F Custodian's Warning about Asbestos Not Protected Speech

See this law review article for a discussion of terrible decisions arising out of Garcetti.

Why are all those complaints not protected by the laws that protect you from retaliation when you complain about working conditions? The asbestos and scabies seem to fall under this.

California has: Labor Code section 6310 prohibits an employer from retaliating against an employee who complains about safety or health conditions or practices at the workplace, institutes or testifies in any proceedings relating to the employee’s rights to safe and healthful working conditions, exercises any rights under the federal or California law relating to occupational health and safety, or participates in an occupational health and safety committee established under Section 6401.7.

OSHA, which seems federal, has whistleblower protection that should cover some other claims.

It seems whistleblowing is only protected when you complain to the right person. That seems stupid to me.

California has: Labor Code section 6310 prohibits an employer from retaliating against an employee who complains about safety or health conditions or practices at the workplace, institutes or testifies in any proceedings relating to the employee’s rights to safe and healthful working conditions, exercises any rights under the federal or California law relating to occupational health and safety, or participates in an occupational health and safety committee established under Section 6401.7.

If this law had any real weight at all, I can assure you. More than half of the hospitals across the state of California would be shutdown due to the overwhelming abuse of this statute. And in no small way. I’ve born witness to so many rife abuses of this, it would lead you to think the Tianjin explosion had better environmental regulations than they do.

This is all kept hush-hush by the HR departments and the on-site legal team at the facilities too. I’ve been there, right in the crosshairs of getting the axe for complaining about these problems openly. Anyone that makes a peep about it is threatened with termination. Or understaffing the department, and then nitpicking everything you do to document a pretext for termination revoking your expedited overstay in the department. One hospital in particular that I worked at, you would only go there if you ‘wanted’ a death sentence. But it’s all lipstick and appearances, you would never know otherwise. I always felt bad for the patients that left thankful correspondence and letters of appreciation for the care they received. In reality, they’re the most ignorant patients that hospitals receive.

Well, the cases cited are ones which specifically raise First Amendment claims. The employees might have had separate claims under various whistleblower laws.

+1

I have long thought that the "government speech" exception was going to result in a series of absurd decisions before it crashes and burns, or we end up with little fascistic fiefdoms where state governments are just openly spending money to keep incumbent parties in power.

Perhaps, but this case isn't about government speech; the government speech doctrine is something different.

I tend to believe in free association a lot more than currently protected which makes this a very grey zone for me. In general I think “most” employees should be able to discriminate in any way that want to which would include speech.

The taxpayer funding part gets complicated here. The employer the voters should get to choose what their employers do in an official capacity. I don’t have a problem if Kendi was an employee of University of Florida and Desantis fired him. I don’t think the State should be able to fire him for his speech as a private person.

Now I think an organization should be able to have some dissidents in management with different ideas and good organizations can deal with it. But if he’s a nuisance to management I don’t have a problem with him being fired.

In the same ninth district of Budapest where two years ago a BLM/LGBTQ kneeling statue of liberty was installed and destroyed soon after,

Amazing story. The American Empire's cultural reach is truly beyond anything I'm aware of existing in all of history. I can barely imagine having to explain to Grover Cleveland what the layered symbols here mean and what the hell they're doing in Budapest.

Unknown people repainted the bench back to the original brown with a sign saying "I just want to be a bench. Which is good for everyone. For you, for him/her. For us."

I like these guys, but I think Auron Macintyre is correct that the side that wants to win will always beat the side that just wants to be left alone.

Amazing story. The American Empire's cultural reach is truly beyond anything I'm aware of existing in all of history. I can barely imagine having to explain to Grover Cleveland what the layered symbols here mean and what the hell they're doing in Budapest.

This is still relatively mild, the rainbow flag isn't particularly American (although now I see they added the trans colors to it, which might be indicative of Americanization). My go-to example of the mind blowing reach of the American Empire is the George Floyd mural in Kabul.

I like these guys, but I think Auron Macintyre is correct that the side that wants to win will always beat the side that just wants to be left alone.

Probably, but I don't know if there's a way to win without becoming an utter sociopath, making me want to nope out of the whole game even more.

the rainbow flag isn't particularly American

The one with the black and brown is extremely American, given that grievance politics about the people who happen to be that color is a unique export from them.

My personal goal is to add another element to the pride flag. It won't mean anything except "you better put this in here too you bigot". I'm thinking maybe a pink and green crescent in the top-right corner.

The one group best represented by the Pride flag is the only one whose skin color is not actually on the flag. (Unless I misread it and the trans flag has all 3 of its colors in there, but I was certain it was only the pink and blue.)

I can barely imagine having to explain to Grover Cleveland what the layered symbols here mean and what the hell they're doing in Budapest.

It’s gonna blow your mind when I tell you what Thomas Jefferson was up to in 1789.

Please elaborate/explain?

Thomas Jefferson was United States minister to France from 1784 to 1789, i.e. before and during the French Revolution. His famous quote, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants," was written in Paris. Jefferson was also a major consultant on The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The Marquis de Lafayette, a major figure in the French Revolution, fought in the American Revolution and was personal friends with Jefferson. America has been exporting revolutionary ideas longer than it's had a constitution.

Tell me. My mind is ready.

Amnesty International

Why are they painting benches in randome eastern european towns?

To foment a Color Revolution

God fucking damn it

All the sorts of people who'd do the actual revolution part just move out of Hungary. It will never happen.

I was literally just making a pun on the word “color” because of the fact that paint is involved.

I groaned in a moderate amount of pain.

Imagine you were a donor, thinking you were sending money to help refugees at the Thai border or women in Saudi Arabia. And then there's this.

It's probably not actually a huge burden in terms of financial resources, but the time and energy being spent to antagonize locals instead of something core to its mission is shocking.

Honestly the donors probably love this. Anything to paint the other side as anti gay bigots likely plays well.

Rhetorical question, Amnesty has been on the side of the devils since inception.

A better question is, why do random Eastern European towns let an NGO (aka a lobbying group) do anything whatsoever to public property?

Probably for the same reason the Texas democrats insist on nominating unelectable flashy progressives for statelevel offices- Budapest is not in agreement with the rest of the country, and outside support is conditioned on stuff like this.

I guess it depends on how these things work. Do NGOs tend to hire locals? I'm imagining the modal E. European townspeople can't just go "it's because of those Americans that rolled into town" in cases like these.

It's a capital city with ca 2 million people, it's not like a random Eastern European town. Amnesty is an international organization with its own Hungarian branch, after all.

The description of the district shows it's dominated by the Hungarian opposition and generally seems like it's probably the hipster district of Budapest, so the local public administration might as well have invited them.

They notably got in quite a bit of hot water last year over accusing Ukraine of committing war crimes by defending populated areas.

It was not simply for defending populated areas. It was for fighting from within them. Doing this legitimized Russia in bombing those areas, because it stops being a war crime to attack civilian-occupied areas unprovoked when you have credible reason to believe in potential enemy presence there (i.e. dozens of social media videos and reports of Ukrainians fighting from within those areas).

Amnesty is really spending its credit on a rainbow bench, eh? At least the local hardware stores must be doing a roaring trade in paint 😁

And really, if a silly fight over painting a bench is the worst that happens, it's all good.

All of these factions are just unwitting pawns of Big Paint.

Has Sherwin-Williams be accumulating seating stock in eastern Europe?

It’s Milgram and Robbers Cave all the way down.

Both of those were faked, if memory serves.

No? I guess you could say they were “faked” in the sense that all social science experiments are “faked”.

What I have seen are allegations that the experiments were unethical, usually framed in a way that suggests the results cannot be trusted (the suggestion is transparently bullshit. Anyone with the slightest understanding of the scientific method knows that informed consent forms make experiments less reliable). You may have been misled by one of them.

Robbers Cave was the second run at the same experiment, run specifically because the first attempt had too much cooperation between the two 'teams', and this wasn't disclosed in Sherif's paper. Worse and perhaps more critically, the paper heavily concealed the extent Sherif (in the first experiment) and OJ Harvey (in Robbers Cave proper) actively manipulated the participants to make them more aggressive or be more affected by the aggression of other participants. It's not as severely a fake as, say, Stanford Prison, but Harvey was on-record as it being a script with an intended conclusion.

Milgram had a lot of information available suggesting that a significant number of his experiment subjects knew or claimed to know that the actor was acting, enough to overturn the conclusions, along with not actually holding to his claimed experimental protocol very consistently. Which is less severe and more borderline as 'faked', but (hopefully!) worse than all social science experiments.

My understanding is that Robber's Cave involved a lot of manipulation by the experimenters to get the boys to behave one way, and that by changing the circumstances they were able to get them all to work together again. "Fake" is an exaggeration, but the standard interpretation of the results may not be correct. E.g. https://www.simplypsychology.org/robbers-cave.html mentions this.

I'm less familiar with the Milligan experiment, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#Validity indicates that the reported data may be inaccurate or missing key information. The section https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#Replications_and_variations indicates that the results could be highly dependent on situation.

It's significantly realer than most social science experiments, because it's been replicated not just once but dozens of times, by different researchers in different contexts. (Though, as you note, the replications are weaker than the original experiment because there's more informed consent.)

Is there a conclusion, some big lesson to learn? I don't know. But maybe it's an interesting data point for how the culture war projects down to the periphery such as Hungary.

If you take @KulakRevolt's most recent article seriously, the correct social immune response to a foreign meme is to react immediately to shut it down. Better that it's done with repainting and national colors than a can of petrol.

Someone could win the internet for the day by editing this gif with the relevant colors.

July 13 - The far-right parliamentary party Our Homeland Movement repainted the bench to the Hungarian national colors of red-white-green the same day. Apparently nobody actually guarded it.

Honestly getting a group of activists to guerrilla-repaint LGBT murals in local flag colors is such low hanging fruit I’m surprised no other Conservative Party has decided to do it.

Wouldn't that be a hate crime in most US states? Sounds like something you could do serious time for

If it was owned by a specific LGBT individual. Not if it was owned by a city.

Almost certainly not. A "hate crime" is a regular crime that is committed because of the status of the victim. There is really no victim here. If I vandalize a mosque or some such, that might be a hate crime. But as I understand it, this is a publicly owned bench.

There's been several cases where people did various things to rainbow road-crossing markers, and while some have found specifically that the state's or city's property could not be a valid target for hate crime purposes under existing law, this does seem to be a specific statutory thing.

Yes, part of the issue is that it has to be based on something more than the defendant's dislike, etc, of the group, because of R.A.V. v. City of St Paul:

As explained earlier, see supra, at 386, the reason why fighting words are categorically excluded from the protection of the First Amendment is not that their content communicates any particular idea, but that their content embodies a particularly intolerable (and socially unnecessary) mode of expressing whatever idea the speaker wishes to convey. St. Paul has not singled out an especially offensive mode of expression—it has not, for example, selected for prohibition only those fighting words that communicate ideas in a threatening (as opposed to a merely obnoxious) manner. Rather, it has proscribed fighting words of whatever manner that communicate messages of racial, gender, or religious intolerance. Selectivity of this sort creates the possibility that the city is seeking to handicap the expression of particular ideas. That possibility would alone be enough to render the ordinance presumptively invalid, but St. Paul's comments and concessions in this case elevate the possibility to a certainty.

I am having trouble imagining how a statute would thread the needle such that painting a public bench to express disapproval of views would be punishable as a hate crime.

It does seem to be charged rather more heavily (as a 'non' hate crime) than your average burnout though:

https://www.wptv.com/news/region-s-palm-beach-county/delray-beach/man-who-defaced-pride-crosswalk-in-delray-beach-pleads-guilty

Is that particularly surprising? The average burnout is not intentional vandalism; moreover, no one is likely to even notice tire marks on a generic street.

The average burnout is not intentional vandalism

How do you know that? The behavior seems just as intentional to me

no one is likely to even notice tire marks on a generic street.

What? They're very noticeable.

The behavior seems just as intentional to me The action might be just as intentional, but the outcome is not. One is apparently meant to destroy the artwork. The other is not meant to destroy anything. There is a difference between painting "Kilroy was here" on a wall and painting "fuck you" on a car.

Maybe don't put your artwork on a street if you don't want it getting tire tracks on it?

More comments

Sounds like a great Eighth Amendment test case. With a dash of the First for flavour.

This calls for a whatcoloristhebench.com

I look forward to a future where everyone wears augmented reality glasses and can make the bench appear to them however they want.

But that’s not the point of painting the bench rainbow-colored in the first place. It’s not just that the activists painting the bench would personally prefer to see a rainbow bench— they’re explicitly doing so in order for other people to see it. “We’re loud, we’re proud” and all that. If such augmented reality goggles emerged with an option to display the bench brown, then that would be tarred as homophobic.

In fact, this hypothetical almost perfectly recalls that actual time when mods for a Spiderman game that removed rainbow flags from the game were scrubbed from all mainstream modding websites.

The funniest bit is they just used the Middle East localization files, which didn't have the rainbow flags in the first place.

Yep, that’s the big irony. Of course, the most parsimonious way you can analyze it is as an out-group/far-group thing: Middle Easterners are the far-group, Anglophone anti-LGBTers are the out-group.

The future in which no one cares what you think is the future where you don't matter to anyone at all.

In 1984 terms:

  • The inner party (top 2%). The ones who paint the bench and force others to accept it. (Amnesty)

  • The outer party (top 10%). The ones who must endure the bench being painted. (Hungary)

  • The proles (bottom 88%). The ones whose opinion is not strongly policed because they have no power or importance whatsoever. (Africa)

This will never be allowed.

Do you remember the guy who modded the Spider-Man game to change LGBTQ+ rainbow flags into American flags (the game is set in New York City) and got his account banned for homophobia for daring to touch the sacred pride flag? That's right: users who bought and paid for the video game are not allowed to change the flag in the game they play on their own computer!

Also, did you know there is another mod for the same game that changes all the American flags in the game into LGTBQ+ flags, and this is perfectly allowed?

Given that, why do you think your augmented reality glasses (courtesy of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or another ESG-compliant mega-corp) would allow you to remove the mandatory pride colors from the bench, you fucking bigot?

Is it possible to be genuinely religious in the modern secular west?

My dad, as far as I know, was a lifelong atheist. But my mother’s family was pretty religious. Typical American, nondenominational but pretty hardcore Protestantism. My dad worked a lot when I was small and I didn’t see him too much so I was mostly raised by my mother and her side of the family.

We believed Jesus died and rose for you (you, reading this, specifically), Catholics are idolaters who need the gospel, Harry Potter is shady at best, every time someone sneezes in Israel the End gets one day closer, and Daniel’s fourth beast is checks notes the European Union.

Growing up, all this felt very very real. God felt like someone standing right next to me - even if you can’t see him, it would be ridiculous to think he wasn’t there. When I sinned it felt like God’s eyes were burning a hole in the back of my head. Once when I was about four, there was a car wreck outside my house and I rushed to the window to see if the Tribulation had kicked off. Whether I would ever grow up was a doubtful proposition because Jesus was coming back very, very soon to judge the world.

I stopped believing in middle school, partly because my dad was around more and he made no effort to hide his contempt for all this stuff, partly because I started going online and got drafted into the Internet Religion Wars of the 2000s. Long story short, after years of online arguments and reading I’m pretty well satisfied intellectually that Christianity is false (I’m less sure about theism in general), but I still feel it deep down.

I have an instinctive reverence for Christian symbology. I get uncomfortable when I hear jokes about God and Jesus, at least the more blasphemous ones. Sometimes I still feel that presence standing next to me, and it doesn’t seem completely out of the realm of possibility that one day I will find myself the unwilling star of my very own Chick tract.

But the vast majority of my acquaintances these days are secular liberals who were raised secular liberals. Some are nominally Jewish or Catholic but as kids they maybe went to religious services once or twice a year. God was a vague idea at most, they never prayed, whatever morals and beliefs their parents raised them with were totally irreligious ones.

When I tell them yes, I have family members who really believe God literally created all life forms as they are now by speaking them into existence, literal demons rejoice when you sin, and Jesus is literally going to come back on a white horse to destroy the wicked it sounds totally insane to them. It’s like talking about Star Wars. Just totally outside their conception of reality. And sometimes I wonder, if they were somehow began, as some do, to intellectually entertain the possibility that Christianity is true, even then would they feel it? If I read some really good apologetics for Islam (maybe they exist, I’ve never really looked) and started to think, “hey, this could be true” I'm not sure I would viscerally fear the wrath of Allah.

America becomes more and more secular every year, and more and more kids grow up like my friends did, and less and less like me. And yet there seems to be a sort of religious revival going on. It’s not really large-scale, at least not yet. But it’s real. On the left-liberal side of the spectrum, this mostly takes the form of ‘alternative’ spiritualities, astrology, energies, and witchcraft. I feel like everybody my age or younger knows at least one person who calls themselves a witch or a satanist or something. There are huge subreddits and other online communities dedicated to this stuff.

But I don’t think it’s real. I know “you don’t really believe what you say you believe” is one of the most infuriating things to hear, but in some cases I think it’s true. Sorry, not only do I not believe you can cast spells or commune with the great goddess, I don’t believe you believe you can cast spells and commune with the great goddess. Maybe you’re not consciously lying, but deep down I think you know you don’t actually have any magic powers. If you did, I think you would behave differently.

The right-wing equivalent to this is the surge, at least online, of young RW (mostly men) converting to various forms of conservative Christianity, whether it be traditional Catholicism or Orthodoxy or Reformed Protestantism or whatever. And I see it as almost perfectly equivalent to the “witchy art student” case. Sorry, twenty-five-year old guy raised by lapsed Episcopalians in New York who calls himself a “Catholic monarchist” on twitter but is totally considering Orthodoxy after reading Fr. Seraphim Rose, and will be considering sedevacantism by next week, I don’t care how many epic deus vult memes you post, I don’t think you really feel it in your bones that one day you’re going to stand before the creator of the universe and be judged.

In both cases I make allowances for exceptions. Some people, I’m sure, really do believe they have some kind of occult power. Some people, I’m sure, despite totally irreligious upbringings, really do have a Road to Damascus moment and come to deeply believe in Jesus Christ.

But for the majority of people, I think this sort of thing is a fashion statement more than anything. And that makes conversion–whether it’s to Christianity, Islam, or occultism–in the modern west different from revivals of previous eras.

Someone who responded to Jonathan Edwards in the 18th century or Billy Sunday in the early twentieth might not have been a very good Christian, but they were still raised in a Christian society where the existence and power of God were taken for granted. So when they heard a guy shouting, “therefore, repent!” it felt like a real threat. They didn’t have to completely rebuild their worldviews from the ground-up, they just had to be reminded, “oh, that’s right! God is real and he does want me to behave!”

Even if you decided to be a satanist a hundred years ago, you were raised believing that Satan was a real, terrifying being with very real power, so you would be making a serious commitment to serve a mighty god, even if you were choosing the other side. Nowadays someone who calls themselves a satanist probably doesn’t even believe Satan is real, and if they do their point of reference is maybe a TV show or a comic book.

In short, I think to really believe in gods and the supernatural, you have to be raised believing in gods and the supernatural, or at least raised in a culture that takes gods and the supernatural seriously. Even, say, someone who converted to Christianity in the 1st century is in a better position than a modern westerner. He already believed the world was in the hands of the gods, which were real beings of power, and had believed this since he was born. He just had to be told, “hey, this new god, he’s even stronger than Zeus or Ba’al!”

For better or worse, has succeeded in obliterating that fundamental sense that I think people have had for most of history that, “the gods are real, and they’re watching.” I find that pretty fascinating.

Yes, people who profess religion because it’s fashionable are just larping, the twitter tradcaths have little overlap with the irl tradcaths(who are red or violet tribers practicing a very strict and very high-demand robustly supernatural religion), and there are generally more apostates from religion in the west than converts in(on a writ large scale- there are plenty of sects that have the opposite balance). However, there’s definitely non-larping believers in very supernatural forms of Christianity who didn’t grow up with it. It’s not impossible, and it happens often enough to be a known thing. Zeal of the convert and all that. Just because it’s foreign to your internal experience doesn’t mean it’s fake.

I grew up a Christian in a full gospel (literal Bible) church which would today be reductively called fundamentalist. As a nerd (with what turned out to be autism and ADHD), I listened to the stories and connected the pieces. I looked for underlying structures, like I do with any sufficiently nerdy story-verse, like Star Trek, DC Comics, or My Little Pony. When I found theological radio shows (Chuck Missler’s 64/40, The Bible Answer Man, and the like), I was thrilled. To me, theology is worship s the Logos, the infinite and eternal mind of God, is the Person of the Trinity I’ve most adored since putting those pieces together. For fifteen years of adulthood, I spent Monday nights in a non-denominational Bible study group which is a local chapter of an international organization. I’ve expected the End Times to start soon, ever since I read a Chick Tract featuring mobile guillotines for Christians in the near future.

But I really didn’t get religiosity, or the atheist view of religiosity, until I read Robert Harris’ Cicero Trilogy, which brought the ancient world of the late Roman Republic to vivid and stunning life. Among the things Harris (not to be confused with Richard Harris) did was subtly but often mention the state religion. Not just the honoring and petitioning of gods, but the auguries, the seeking of divine signs in the entrails of small animal sacrifices. After seeing what reverence the Romans placed on auguries, it made sense that Caesar’s most public play for political power was getting himself chosen as the head high priest of Rome. It also suddenly made sense to me why the early Christians were called “atheists”: because they did not participate in the very public rituals and observances.

I still go to the same church I grew up in, though I’m one of only a few of my approx. age still there. I still believe in Jesus, though I’ve had several crises of faith. I still know the little details and nuances of the Bible and believe them to be real history, though I have an instinctive dislike of superstition and woo-woo pseudoscience.

In case it helps, here's my experience as an online rightish guy who's become interested in Catholicism, though I don't go around posting le epic Deus Vult memes. Would I feel the truth of it? No, and I worry about that sometimes. Currently, I consider conservative Christianity good, in that it binds families together, brings people together across generations, and have definitely noticed that the Christians I know lead better lives, etc. But I don't know if I can (or will ever) consider it true, which is a source of concern and some despair to me, because if I can't get to that, then I feel like I'm damaging their group by being there. As for the wilder stuff like sedevacantism, I was lucky enough that the group I found seems to have its head screwed on. I spoke to one of the lay Brothers about the Church leadership, and he said that they respect and obey the Pope while disagreeing with him, pray for him a lot to help him make better decisions, hold out hope that things will change, and believe they get the Popes they deserve.

But even from the secular pit I've dug myself into, there's been some interesting moments. Sitting and contemplating the quiet and stillness before Mass has been beautiful, and while I can't say I've felt presence there, it's been wonderful to enjoy the absence of outside noise and chatter. It's also been interesting to have spent a lot of time reading about and working on psychological integration and then have another parishioner just casually mention that "sin divides man from God, but it also divides man from himself". Duh! No wonder we're all such messes!

Now that I am a (functional) atheist, my position is that if someone thinks their life will improve by becoming Christian (or anything else), go for it. Why not? But I find the trend of people heading towards traditional Christianity because they feel it will improve their lives and communities interesting, because it is just about the exact opposite of what I was taught. Granted I grew up Protestant and not Catholic, but what I was made to understand was that you should expect Christianity to make your life worse. "You will be hated by all men for my name's sake." Now yes there was talk about finding peace and meaning in Jesus, and of course there was the fellowship of believers, but the expectation was that when it came to friends, money, love, happiness, even sometimes family, Christians will do worse than unbelievers, since the world is a hellbound, fallen place that rewards the wicked. Christianity was one big exercise in delayed gratification. Suffer now, redeem your suffering points in Heaven (or at the Rapture, if you're lucky).

I remember a tweet a few months ago, I can't find it now, but it said something like, "Jesus doesn't offer heroism, adventure, wives, or children in this life; he offers pain, service, trial, and tears." It circulated on RW twitter and occasioned a lot of blowback along the lines of calling OP a leftist, modernist, soy, etc. and "good luck attracting young men to the church with a message like this." It was sort of baffling to me because while I would have understood if it was something like "Jesus would be pro-LGBT" or "Jesus was a socialist," which I would agree are reading into the Bible things that are absolutely not there, the tweet as it stood was simply what I was told Christianity was by my very Christian and very-not liberal relatives. And of course we were taught that our job as Christians was not to make Christianity attractive to anyone, whether it was conservatives looking for patriotism and tradition or liberals looking for inclusion and egalitarianism, but simply to preach the gospel as it was, and if you didn't like it, well too bad.

"good luck attracting young men to the church with a message like this."

Pain, service, trial and tears specifically attract young men. Like, not all young men, but a certain category of young men? Very much so.

I'm paraphrasing, but the gist of it was "don't expect worldly glory or success from Christ." Absolutely though there are plenty of people who are attracted to such a calling, including many young men. I think it was specifically some kind of in-house snipe at the whole "be like Achilles, put cities to the sword" side of RW twitter.

expect Christianity to make your life worse

This is very interesting, and I hadn't thought about it before. Yes, there's the persecution and all that, but I think there's some kind of "don't defect" at play here: teaching people to delay gratification until even after their death means that their communities can have very low time preference, and if you have few defectors you can possibly even get better immediate results than if you actively sacrificed the future for today.

Jesus doesn't offer heroism, adventure, wives, or children in this life; he offers pain, service, trial, and tears.

I read an article a few months back about the cult popularity of Master and Commander, and how many young men love that movie. Not because they want to be Capt. Aubrey, but because they want to be in his crew and to sacrifice for each other and for a great cause. I'm also reminded of a video by Bishop Barron where he talks about how he thinks the interest in traditional liturgies has been specifically because it's hard: it's the call to sacrifice and spiritual challenge which seems to make people interested. (There's probably a big diversion about Vatican II here too that I'm not qualified to write.)

we were taught that our job as Christians was not to make Christianity attractive to anyone

The people who did the most to attract me to Christianity never proselytized; they quietly lived their lives of faith, and I happened to notice. Whether that's because the Christian life does better in this world because God looks after his own, or because there are good memes baked into the religion, I don't know.

Just to offer my experience:

Raised Catholic. Became an annoying internet atheist during college. Started drifting back towards it due to the culture war, really started being pulled back largely due to Jordan Petersons biblical series lectures. My sister is also a very devout Catholic and lots of discussions with her.

A lot of influence has been reading about the early church, and the role of the church in maintaining a link between the modern and ancient worlds during the dark ages. (Read: a canticle for leibowitz for a fictional sci fi dramatization of what I’m talking about).

In the time since 2016-17 when this started, I’ve gotten married and had two children.

Obviously you can guess my influences given that history. I was a non believer (and never really believed as a kid), but the approach to the church and apologetics that my wife and I share, in my opinion, does make the miraculous and supernatural claims the church makes become literally true, and that is essentially the miracle.

Became an annoying internet atheist during college. Started drifting back towards it due to the culture war, really started being pulled back largely due to Jordan Petersons biblical series lectures.

This part is extremely relatable. That was the biggest thing that made me curious about religion as a tool to organize societies. I had heard about Chesterton's Fence from Scott, become curious about the man behind it and stumbled onto Orthodoxy. Then I looked at some of Bishop Barron's stuff and began irregularly attending local Masses. Started reading Lewis, and discovered many echoes of 2020 in his novel That Hideous Strength. And the more I read, the more interested I become, though I struggle with the actual faith bit and the idea of trusting the men right at the top.

I'm almost at the same place, time period, devout sister (and brother) and marriage and two children included (but Jordan Peterson not included), expect for Orthodoxy.

Good for you :). I really hope and pray that someday the Catholic and Orthodox churches reunite.

Even, say, someone who converted to Christianity in the 1st century is in a better position than a modern westerner. He already believed the world was in the hands of the gods, which were real beings of power, and had believed this since he was born. He just had to be told, “hey, this new god, he’s even stronger than Zeus or Ba’al!”

Hmm, not so sure about that, Aristophanes The Clouds was written in 423 BC and portrays a society where old-style paganism was already going out of fashion. Of course, Greece is not Rome or Judea. But there is an argument that Christianity was persuasive to people who were already cynical about the old gods. There is another argument that Christianity was a result of a fusion between old-school pagan-style personal Gods and Platonic/philosophical concepts about the nature of the prime mover of the universe, hence a God that is the Logos made flesh.

As I read more and more philosophy, I see more and more that "There is nothing new under the sun" (ecleiseiathies, or however the fuck you spell it).

Nietzche was as right then as he is now. "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him."

People leave out the most important part of the quote, though: "How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?"

The service religion provided to people and societies in the past is no longer available to fully industrialized, scientifically advanced western style societies. If you want the binding moral force of religion back, you gotta give up all that other bullshit and live on a pillar in the desert.

It really is incredible how few people understood the point he was making or even realised how significant it was. I like to think that I'm a smart person but even I've got to admit a certain amount of awe at someone who managed to figure that out at the time he did.

Is it possible to be genuinely religious in the modern secular west?

Yes. You're gesturing at the deconstruction of traditional values that we all lived through in the 2000s, the internet atheist wars. Elsewhere in the thread:

William Burroughs summarized the whole social conservative movement perfectly as “decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces.”

And my response is: it's still the "decent church-going women" (and, often, men), they still wear mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces. Often, literally the same actual people. They just left their old church and joined your new, political not-a-church.

The thing is, though, the pinch-faces emerge for a reason. Social Justice is a trash-disaster, but it didn't come from nowhere, and the problems that drive it are, on the whole, real, unavoidable, and demand a response. That response is going to have to be some sort of formalized moral system, and such a system is going to need a mythic grounding.

The atomic individualist, morally-relativist state pursued by the secularist wave in the 2000s is not sustainable. People need structure, need guidance, and removing that structure and guidance isn't sustainable long-term; the resulting instability, combined with the human search for solutions to problems, will recapitulate an irresistible demand for legible social structures founded on metaphysical truth claims.

Maybe you’re not consciously lying, but deep down I think you know you don’t actually have any magic powers. If you did, I think you would behave differently.

It seems you are presuming that the average believer in the past expected, for lack of a better term, legible magic as a routine part of life. I don't see why this should be the case. It seems pretty obvious from historical accounts that normal people did not expect miracles as a normal part of their existence; their epistemic grounding was not functionally different from ours. Believing that miracles or magic happen does not mean that you think they are going to happen to you; we all believe that the lottery exists, but none of us expect to win it. Then, too, it is easy to interpret things that happen as being miraculous, but this doesn't mean you count on them happening reliably either.

But for the majority of people, I think this sort of thing is a fashion statement more than anything.

It always has been, though. Look back on historical accounts of figures from five or eight or ten or twenty centuries ago, and ask yourself if the people depicted are acting as though they actually expect to answer to their Gods. I've seen this argument before, that if people really believed, it would drastically modify their behavior. The thing is, it does drastically modify the behavior of a sizable minority, and it never modified the behavior of anything more than a sizable minority, even in the times when you're claiming belief was near-universal. That sense that you're going to answer personally to God is sustained by personal choice and effort, and unless it is cultivated, it simply goes away.

I've seen this argument before, that if people really believed, it would drastically modify their behavior.

I've made this argument myself. Now I'm worried that its wrong.

Think about type II diabetes and morbid obesity. Call it the fat nurse problem. Nurses know that they are heading for trouble because they have treated patients a little older than they are who have already run into trouble. It is as if you go on holiday to Rome and the Vatican is doing tours of Hell. You wonder what became of some-one who died recently and who lived a wicked life. You take the tour and spot him among the damned, suffering. Later you return to the USA determined to mend your own wicked ways, and like the fat nurse and her diet, you fail to do so.

Yes, we see people who fail to modify their behavior. In the context of religious belief, we feel tempted to draw an inference: they do not really believe. In the context of practical matters, they have often seen with their own eyes. Of course they believe! And yet they fail to modify their behavior. What then becomes of our logic? In the religious context, we lack clear guidance about whether people believe, so we attempt to infer belief from behavior. In the practical context we have a contingent gold standard for belief: sometimes folk have seen the truth with their own eyes so naturally they really believe. There is no need to attempt an inference.

On the other hand, there is an opportunity to check the validity of our inference. The inference that we draw from behavior ought to agree with belief that we infer on the basis of noticing that some people have direct experience and must therefore believe. Whoops! Disaster has struck. In the practical case we notice people who must really believe, failing at responding appropriately. So the inference we want to make in the religious case is invalid.

What then becomes of the observation that true belief drastically modifies the behavior of a sizable minority, but only a minority? My guess is that in times of universal belief in God, most people really believe. They have a sense that they are going to answer personally to God. They sin anyway. They repent. They sin some more. They face death with a combination of fear and cope, sometimes dreading punishment, sometimes hoping the God is love and will not judge them too harshly.

It seems you are presuming that the average believer in the past expected, for lack of a better term, legible magic as a routine part of life. I don't see why this should be the case. It seems pretty obvious from historical accounts that normal people did not expect miracles as a normal part of their existence; their epistemic grounding was not functionally different from ours.

I think this framing is wrong. Ordinary people may have not expected to see a resurrection or a theophany in their lifetimes, but while moderns tend to conceptualize a miracle as God suspending the ordinary operations of an otherwise mechanistic, naturalistic universe, pre-moderns tended to view the hand of the gods in everything. Sickness is from the supernatural world. The outcomes of wars are credited to the gods. Natural disasters reflect divine displeasure. Everywhere they looked, there was evidence of the spirit world at work. People believed in the immediate reality of the supernatural and acted accordingly. As late as the 19th century, French peasants left peace offerings for fairies in the woods. To an ancient Israelite, Yahweh parting the Red Sea may not be quantitatively different from Yahweh empowering Israel to defeat its enemies in battle. We would call the former a miracle because we would consider it naturalistically inexplicable, but not the latter. But for an ancient, while the the parting of a sea would be much rarer and more magnificent than a victory in battle, it might not be qualitatively different, because everything only happens because the gods make it so, even if sometimes what the gods make so is more unique and incredible than other times.

I'm having a hard time understanding this argument. You read old books which constantly talk about God, divine providence, etc... and your conclusion is that people weren't religious?

If anything, modern people tend to vastly underestimate just how religious people were in the past. As you point out, in the 1600s of Europe, there wasn't a competing ethos. Christianity served not just as a religion in the modern sense, but as law, cosmology, and history as well. Religion permeated all aspects of society. That is completely gone now.

Great Awakening aside, Christianity has been in a near monotonic decline since the Renaissance. People today are less religious than those of 1980, who were less religious than 1950, who were less religious than 1920, etc...

It’s always been funny to me when people don’t see it in reverse now. And personally I hold the opinion that most of the religious fervor or lack thereof comes down to culture. People in general don’t read the texts, unless they’re going into ministry of some sort. They don’t really think about theology or anything else. If you’re raised in a culture that is absolutely convinced that the Eucharist is literal actually the Body and Blood, you will believe it.

A big part, to me, of the difference has been public education with its officially unofficial agnosticism. When the culture tells you that god/s don’t matter, and when public officials are reluctant to sound too religious, it’s basically creating a culture of atheism. People will almost always follow the party line of those aspirational figures in public life on most issues. And our political and social elites are at best deist in a vary vague sense, or educational institutions are atheist or agnostic (they aren’t officially going to mock you for being religious, but they’re certainly not going to acknowledge religion in a positive way), and most social heroes are atheists. Without a positive example of the elite being religious, the end result is the decline of the religion.

If you’re raised in a culture that is absolutely convinced that the Eucharist is literal actually the Body and Blood, you will believe it.

I didn't. I was raised in a culture that was monolithically christian (at least nominally) and I always took it as a metaphor until I was explained that it was actually meant to be taken literally (transubstantiation) and it seemed... idiotic? That was the first crack for me.

Even though I lately try hard to believe people when they make claims about their motivations & internal experience, I think you're definitely onto something. Though perhaps a more charitable (if banal) take might be less 'you dont really believe that' and more ' "I believe X" captures a really wide range of intuitions, mental states and devotional intensity'. And we probably preserve some of that ambiguity more or less intentionally - I imagine piety-measuring contests are some of the least productive uses of human effort yet discovered.

It helps to be raised with religion for religiosity, in the same way it helps being raised speaking Chinese to master Chinese. But I think what you’re describing is adults having religious experiences. The absolute felt certainty of God is something like a blessing, not a pre-requirement of a religion. You mention the revivals of the previous eras. Consider John Wesley, one of the most important 18th century Christians, who founded Methodism:

In one of my last [letters] I was saying that I do not feel the wrath of God abiding on me; nor can I believe it does. And yet (this is the mystery), I do not love God. I never did. Therefore I never believed, in the Christian sense of the word. Therefore I am only an honest heathen…..And yet, to be so employed of God! And so hedged in that I can neither get forward nor backward! Surely there was never such an instance before, from the beginning of the world! If I ever have had that faith, it would not be so strange. But I never had any other evidence of the eternal or invisible world than I have now; and that is none at all, unless such as faintly shines from reason’s glimmering ray. I have no direct witness (I do not say, that I am a child of God, but) of anything invisible or eternal […] I want all the world to come to what I do not know”

I've been a believing Christian all my life, but it was only in the last year that I realized I loved God. It just came out one day while I was praying, "I love you God" and I was stunned that it was actually true. I had faith all my life that God loved me, but I didn't love Him. I just respected Him, and feared Him, and wanted to please Him. Not at all the same things. So your Wesley quote resonated with me greatly.

I've never once seen a Born Again TradCath Right Wing-Er IRL, it's very much online posturing looking for the mirror opposite of moralistic progressivism, especially since New Atheism got eaten from the inside by moralistic progressivism.

Only thoughtful weirdos ever really cared about genuine religious faith; most nominal church-going people were just getting an emotional high from being in a chanting crowd. The rest were conforming to get by; now they conform to the New Faith to get by.

I agree that strict adherence to all the rules and regulations of any given religion has always been a minority affair, but I think the disenchantment of the world, to where there are no longer gods in the skies or spirits behind the trees, is new.

I've never once seen a Born Again TradCath Right Wing-Er IRL

Where have you looked?

I think a good exploration of this topic is John Michael Greer's series of posts on the "disenchantment of the world." While I have always found his religious sensibilities (the guy is an honest-to-god(s) Archdruid after all) a bit peculiar and had the same suspicions you might about the sincerity of his beliefs, I can't deny that he is about as good a translator as you could wish for of many concepts that we rationalist and rationalist-adjacent moderns have lost touch with.

This is a great read. I think this is exactly what I'm getting at. A lot of people have responded and said that most people were not religious fanatics, even in the most religious of times, which is true, but not really my point. My point is more that while most people may not have been zealots, most people did have a worldview in which zealotry made sense.

Several people in response to this have mentioned New Atheism and this is something I've been curious about for a while. Can someone explain the whole New Atheism / internet atheism wars thing to me?

I grew up secular. My parental figures were not particularly religious, and I myself saw no reason to buy into any organized religion when I was a kid or subsequently, either. I am not a physicalist reductionist. I'm one of those people who thinks that the hard problem of consciousness may well be beyond the reach of science. However, that does not compel me to become a Christian or a Muslim or whatever. I am basically an agnostic who has zero belief in any organized religion but who also thinks that there may well be true mysteries in the world that are beyond the reach of science.

In part because of my agnosticism, which I have never seen reason to revise, I missed the whole New Atheism / internet atheism wars thing. The issue of religion was just not very interesting to me back then. I neither could imagine that any Christian, for example, could really turn me into a Christian, nor did I need any more arguments for being an agnostic than I already had.

In the last few years I have seen many people refer to New Atheism and the atheism wars and so on, but I don't really have much context for it other than that it's something that people on 4chan refer to in order to make fun of stereotypical Redditors. While I am not a fan of stereotypical Redditors, I also fail to see why being convinced that a man 2000 years ago rose from the dead despite a near-total lack of evidence that this happened other than the writings of a few people who probably never knew him in real life is supposed to make one better than a stereotypical Redditor.

I know who Dawkins is, having read his The Selfish Gene, but I have not read any of his stuff about religion. I also vaguely know who Dennett is, he seems to be convinced that the hard problem of consciousness is not real, a position that I find rather absurd, but to be fair I have not actually read any of his stuff. For me the question of consciousness is orthogonal to the question of whether any particular religions are valid. Anyway, I would like more information about the whole brouhaha and the extent to which it is or is not important.

Presumably you've read Scott Alexander's essay on the topic (if not, you should). Internet culture was just different back then. It was taken as given that the purpose of discussion and argument was to convince people, or at least to discover the truth.

"Maybe it took about ten years from the founding of the Internet for people to really internalize that online arguments didn’t change minds. The first Internet pioneers, starting their dial-up modems and running headfirst into people outside their filter bubbles, must have been so excited. For the first time in human history, people interested in debating a subject could do so 24-7 out in a joint salon-panopticon with all of the information of the human race at their fingertips. Bible Belt churchgoers for whom atheists had been an almost-fictional bogeyman, and New York atheists who thought of the religious as unsophisticated yokels, came together for the first time thinking “Convincing these people is going to be so easy”. The decade or so before they figured out that it wasn’t was a magical time, of which the great argument-arsenals of the past are almost the only remaining monument."

This classic XKCD from 2008 captures the feeling. What made the atheism wars especially susceptible to this phenomenon is that it was not a disagreement of opinion or judgement, it was a disagreement of fact, which meant it was theoretically possible to literally prove the other side wrong. The idea, common today in the intellectual right circles that many users here frequent, that religion is important because it binds the community together, provides shared values, and gives meaning to the lives of the populace, should not be anachronistically read back into the discourse. That's just not what these controversies were about. People back then really thought that the Earth was 6000 years old, hurricanes were God's punishment for abortion, and that demon possession was a real physical occurrence. Some people still believe that, but they know better than to open their mouths about it in public now.

Several people in response to this have mentioned New Atheism and this is something I've been curious about for a while. Can someone explain the whole New Atheism / internet atheism wars thing to me?

Until the Internet became a thing, atheists were pretty fringe - certainly they have always existed, but to actually declare yourself an atheist, let alone join an atheist organization, required a commitment towards nonbelief that, in those days, was very strongly coded as countercultural, antisocial, and quite possibly a dirty un-American commie. The most public figurehead for atheists was Madalyn Murray O'Hair, who founded American Atheists in the 1960s and was, by all accounts, a remarkably unpleasant woman.

Then came the Internet, and like every other niche tribe, atheists all over the world were able to gather, commiserate, and wage tribal war against their enemies. Early Internet atheism was mostly marked by edgy militants dunking on Christians (the "Invisible Sky Fairy" and similar memes were popularized in that era, though I'm sure someone had used that phrase much earlier).

New Atheism was basically a movement to put an intellectual, academic face on atheism. Instead of keyboard warriors flaming each other on the Internet or bitter legal nuisances like O'Hair, you had scientists and journalists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris presenting atheism as serious opposition to religion, attempting to attack religion's privileged place in society and education.

Then public atheism was largely consumed by social justice activism ("SJWs" in those days, "wokes" today). New Atheism fell to movements like Atheism+, which criticized New Atheism for being too Straight White Male, not feminist enough, and for criticizing Islam. (I am only kind of joking but not really with that last one.) The original New Atheists are still plodding along, but seem to have largely lost cultural relevance, while A+ long ago added their ideological and technological distinctiveness to the general woke movement and their culture was adapted to service it.

Very interesting. I did not realize that religion was still a powerful enough force in the West in the first decade of this century to motivate a backlash of this nature. However, I myself have pointed out before here on The Motte that there are many people even today in the West who grow up in oppressive religious environments, and I suppose that probably in their rebellion against those environments, they formed a large part of the core of the atheist movement.

The idea that there would be a movement to put an intellectual, academic face on atheism also surprises me. I have been under the impression that atheism was already predominantly an intellectual thing long before New Atheism and that it also very often expressed itself in an academic way long before New Atheism.

Atheism+ does seem pretty strange to me at first glance.

We are…

Atheists plus we care about social justice,

Atheists plus we support women’s rights,

Atheists plus we protest racism,

Atheists plus we fight homophobia and transphobia,

Atheists plus we use critical thinking and skepticism.

-https://freethoughtblogs.com/blaghag/2012/08/atheism/

To me, the political consequences of atheism have always been secondary to whether it is true or not. I can of course understand why people who feel oppressed by social conservatism would be drawn to atheism for political reasons, given the long-standing connection between social conservatism and organized religion. However, to me the above quote seems almost as silly as if someone wrote:

We are…

People who think that the Riemann hypothesis is true, plus we care about social justice,

People who think that the Riemann hypothesis is true, plus we support women’s rights,

People who think that the Riemann hypothesis is true, plus we protest racism,

People who think that the Riemann hypothesis is true, plus we fight homophobia and transphobia,

People who think that the Riemann hypothesis is true, plus we use critical thinking and skepticism.

It might help to understand that the Atheist movement was sort of built around the idea that the Problem With Modern Society was that it was still beholden to religious superstition, and that if religion's stranglehold on the general population could be broken, a new era of reason and cooperation and enlightened policy could dawn. A lot of them weren't just arguing that religion was dumb, they were arguing that religion was the obstacle to a better world.

One of the problems is that this wasn't actually true. Once religion appeared to be on the run in the Obama years, it turned out that none of the problems were actually solved, and so they needed a new target, a new explanation for why everything was still so fucked up even when they'd won.

Hence, Wokeness.

To me, the political consequences of atheism have always been secondary to whether it is true or not.

But this is the mistake of atheism in a nutshell. No, it doesn't actually matter if the symbolic lies are true or not, all that ever mattered was the political consequences.

And they, well we, learned it pretty harshly. Reason, skepticism and technics cannot stand alone, Man craves religion, and religion he will make even in irreligion.

The fogey christians whom we mocked for being concerned what it was we believed in if not Christ, those who couldn't fathom that there could be a lack of worship altogether. Far from the close minded fools we took them for, those people were just right if in a very roundabout way. And one of the cornerstones of New Atheist argumentation, which is essentially to say that we can have morality and 90s liberal society without Christ, whilst it sounded and still does sound very nice and coherent, was just wrong.

I would guess a lot, maybe most, of the more obnoxious internet atheist warriors, such as I was in my preteen and teenage years, were probably raised Christian (and usually Christian of the more serious, fundamentalist variety). And for me at least, it started out as a quest to prove one way or the other whether or not Christianity was true, and once I decided it wasn't, morphed into a somewhat vindictive impulse to own Christians online. The 2000s, were also the height of Evangelicalism as a cultural movement in the US. Evangelicals had a much stronger cultural presence than they do now, which made it more fun to dunk on them. Bush was the evangelical president (even though, technically, he was a mainliner).

As to why New Atheism exploded in the 2000s, I think it was precisely as a reaction to the apotheosis of evangelical Christianity. Which in turn was mostly a backlash to the cultural revolution of the 60s and 70s. Which in turn...you get the idea. It died out mostly because evangelicalism receded from the public eye, and also because, yes, it became unbearably 'cringe' and uncool. I genuinely think there are a non-zero number of individuals who have more or less memed themselves into being religious just since they don't have to be associated with the fedora people.

I never read Dennett, Dawkins, or any of the 'four horsemen.' I never really got into the whole creation vs evolution thing either because I was never much of a STEM kid. I was more into arguing about the resurrection of Jesus, the historicity of the Exodus, etc. Things that remain abiding interests for me to this day, though I think I am less annoying about it now.

Several people in response to this have mentioned New Atheism and this is something I've been curious about for a while. Can someone explain the whole New Atheism / internet atheism wars thing to me?

America was going through its mini great awakening with a christian evangelical president when 9/11 happened, to which the Bush responded by starting his own holy war in the middle east. It seemed like religious fanatics would just keep ruining everyone's day forever and atheism looked very good by comparison. A few books were published about the topic, somewhat coincidentally and it sort of picked up steam on the internet, especially the nascent youtube.

The label "New Atheism" is mostly just a press label, like IDW, it doesn't really denote anything in particular. If you read arguments about atheism from the late 1600s almost everything is already there (minus evolution and geology).

And then the evangelical awakening died out, McCain lost to Obama (who acknowledged atheism in his inauguration speech) and there was no reason for the movement anymore. What remained ended up being the first victim of SJWs in 2012. Then gamergate happened and people from new atheism either became sjws or anti-sjw (the "skeptics"). The anti-sjw side of atheism doesn't really have a home in american politics (it can't be with the democrats but it also can't be republican because it would alienate the reliable evangelical voter base); when tech platforms (twitter and youtube in particular) moved to do politically biased content moderation (mid 2017 and 2018) the atheistic side of anit-sjw was essentially wiped out.

I think atheism is due for a comeback, this decade, because of all the dissident right people who are adopting orthodoxy/sedevacantism to own the libs.

While I am not a fan of stereotypical Redditors, I also fail to see why being convinced that a man 2000 years ago rose from the dead despite a near-total lack of evidence that this happened other than the writings of a few people who probably never knew him in real life is supposed to make one better than a stereotypical Redditor.

Boy, you're opening a huge can of worms here...

While I am not a fan of stereotypical Redditors, I also fail to see why being convinced that a man 2000 years ago rose from the dead despite a near-total lack of evidence that this happened other than the writings of a few people who probably never knew him in real life is supposed to make one better than a stereotypical Redditor.

because people were:

  1. a dick about it.
  2. incredibly cringey.

okay so one of the things that you saw on reddit a lot was this complete disdain for anything Christian. probably because they were teenagers or whatever, but the people getting upset over people saying "bless you" or "merry Christmas" or their mom wanting to pray at Christmas dinner or whatever were absolutely flooring. it seemed like a caricature. the amount of people saying how they owned the fundies or whatever, whether true or not1 was absolutely flooring. you also had the professional quote makers acting with a complete lack of self awareness. or the faces of atheism people. or the people who would argue about it endlessly in YouTube video responses (remember when those were a thing?) and culture war forums.

people essentially made their identity about not believing in God and getting really really mad at anyone that found comfort or peace within religion. it kinda dominated the internet. and when people would discuss how not everyone are like these knuckleheads, it'd erupt into a well... holy war with everyone else being wrong on the internet in their view.

i imagine a lot of them were teenagers who were rebelling against their parents for making them go to church on Sunday or whatever. and no doubt, people do have legitimate grievances, but internet flamewarring and circlejerking didn't really do anything.

1: i would be remiss to not point out the MsScribe story where a woman spent years faking harassment from Christian internet stalkers for internet clout.

I'm not able to help with the new atheism internet history but if you've read Dawkins that's probably enough to get the gist of the general sense of the righteousness of the atheist tribe and of course the rational points raised against faith beliefs.

But as you mention agnosticism and seeing the limitations of physicalism I really want to point you to the idea of non-theism. This is the idea that contemporary framings of religion and atheism share the same modal mistake in the focus on propositional beliefs, with say a literalist creed asserting that everything in the bible being literally true, and an atheist refuting those beliefs.

But in many ways, while the rationalist critique of atheism is valid, it is also a straw man. Religion has also always been about participating in relationship with a phenomenological reality that is beyond oneself. Atheism, mired in a reductive physicalism is not able to engage with this and so ignores it, also reducing religion to this limited frame.

I disagree with this, at least in the case of Christianity. I think the vast majority of Christians throughout history would agree that Christianity stands or falls on the proposition that Jesus Christ died and rose from the dead. If this is false, Christianity is false, and if it is true, Christianity is true. As Paul said, "if Christ be not raised, your faith is in vain." You can try to construct some kind of Christianity where the historical reality of whether or not the resurrection took place is besides the point (see, Shelby Spong) but such endeavors have always struck me as pointless.

There's truth in that of course, but your rebuttal somewhat proves the point as it's very reductive and misses a lot of what religion also is. Religion in addition to the creedal beliefs is also pointing beyond as it is about engaging with that which is greater. The Christianity of different times, say Meister Eckhart or Thomas Aquinas, is not sufficiently countered by Jesus never did miracles or was the son of God because it would be scientifically impossible.

The point is that atheism is lacking also, it is floundering on the rocks of reductive materialism. Religion points to some of what it's missing. What we do next is not theism as we've done, and it's not atheism, hence the idea of non-theism.

I tend to agree that the old religions have been rendered obsolete, more or less empirically; science has reduced them to Russell's teapot. Some people still believe in them, genuinely, but that's more of a feature of their personal psychological ability to believe things as a result of cultural overhang or because they want them to be true than of any epistemological strength of the belief systems, the latter being similar in some sense to QAnonism.

Science taketh, but science also giveth, and thanks to the empirical advances of machine learning and the retreat of the soul in prevailing theories of cognition, there is now plenty of room for new religions. The Simulation Hypothesis is fertile ground for spiritual entrepreneurs to build neo-gnosticisms. Roko was the John Edwards of Yudkowskianism. Reports abound of the emotional tortures of EA types who have heard his brimstone sermon, and I trust their sincerity. Scott's The Hour I First Believed is a more sophisticated and pro-social synthesis.

Lack of belief is ancient. See Psalm 14/53: "The fool says in his heart, there is no God…"

It's also not new that there's a social component. That too has always been the case. Do you think the Christians of the early first millenium did not have status play any subtle effect? What about the protestants or catholics in the pamphlet wars of the reformation? Both of these groups died for their faiths, but you would have them be insincere.

I disagree. You don’t have to be raised believing in gods and the supernatural (or such a culture). Even so, I don’t think anyone is truly an atheist, as David Foster Wallace said, “In the day to day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. Everybody worships.” We just call old gods by new, modern names that don’t sound supernatural.

Also, this assertion downplays the power of Jesus Christ to reach into someone’s life and soften their heart. To know Jesus is to know that He still performs miracles, today. Why can’t He quicken someone’s spirit and raise them from the (spiritual) grave if He wants?

Ezekiel 36:26-27 “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.”

John 3:5-8 “Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

Timothy Ballard is a former DHS agent who, in 2013, left his role fighting criminal child exploitation and founded Operation Underground Railroad, or OUR. It's a parapolice organization which operates internationally, infiltrating child trafficking rings, identifying ring leaders, working with local law enforcement to arrest the leaders, and providing support to the victims after they are rescued. [1] I have not delved deeply into the history or workings of the group, so their actual effectiveness is a mystery to me, but they boast some impressive sounding results; a blog post from yesterday claims 51 survivors of an international sex ring saved and 22 suspects apprehended in "a joint effort by the Hellenic Police, the Spanish National Police, INTERPOL, O.U.R., A21, and Homeland Security Investigations." [2] It sounds very impressive, uplifting, and even badass. It's the kind of thing Hollywood would love to make a movie about - and they did.

In 2015, director Alejandro Monteverde and a production company approached Ballard to make a movie documenting his exploits. Ballard had been approached many times before by for movie deals but had turned them all down. This time, Monteverde's work was able to impress Ballard (and his wife) enough to convince him to sign on to a movie deal. Ballard was extensively interviewed, a script was written, and filming started in the summer of 2018. Interestingly, Ballard requested that actor Jim Caviezel portray him - Caviezel notably portrayed Jesus (yes that one) in Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, though Ballard cited Caviezel's performance in The Count of Monte Cristo as the reason for his request. The film was completed that year and Fox was signed on to distribute the film under the name The Sound of Freedom. [3]

Fox was not around long enough to complete the deal. They were acquired by Disney, who shelved the movie (Disney later claimed they had no knowledge of the movie, which is plausible given the enormity of both Disney and the former Fox). It sat in limbo until earlier this year, when the filmmakers bought back the rights to the movie and approached Angel Studios for distribution. Angel Studios is an interesting company; they are entirely supported by equity crowdfunding, in which small investors provide funding in exchange for securities. As the name might suggest they are heavily Christian focused, with one of their largest previous projects being The Chosen, a dramatic television retelling of the life of Jesus Christ. They implement their crowdfunding model by presenting their investors with several options for new projects and ask them to vote for which ones they would like to see. Reportedly, The Sound of Freedom reached a critical threshold of votes within days, the release was greenlit, and the movie hit theaters on July 4, 2023. It instantly became a hit, and a target for hits.

If you have heard about this movie before now, it was probably in the context of controversy. Lefty media outlets have been dogpiling it, with Rolling Stone calling it "a Superhero Movie for Dads With Brainworms"[5] and a CBC Radio columnist saying it was "a dog whistle for xenophobic Pro-Trump, Pro-Life types".[6] Criticism of the movie itself is weak, with the arguments boiling down to "it's not realistic" and "the plot doesn't always make sense", things that could be leveled at any summer blockbuster. External to the film, they criticize Caviezel and his penchant for QAnon conspiracy theories, but never mention the Mexican native director, whose father and brother were kidnapped and killed by a cartel.[7] What many have been focusing on is these outlets' attempts to seemingly pull the rug out from under the whole movie by downplaying child trafficking as a real world issue, trotting out 'experts' to point out how the depiction is 'dangerous' because it sets 'unrealistic expectations' and generally setting the tone that trafficking isn't really a thing people should be worried about.

This has set them up for the obvious counter from the Right: why are you so mad about a movie where a guy saves children? Child trafficking is bad... right? These commenters point out how outlets like Rolling Stone defended Cuties (the infamous Netflix movie about pubescent girls dancing in modern sexually charged style) and didn't seem to have a problem with Taken, the 2008 movie with an obviously exaggerated human trafficking plot. But that was a decade and a half ago, and we know why this is happening now: it's culture war, pure and simple. While Righties are accusing the Lefties of covering up for their corrupt pedo elites, I theorized this might be legacy media feeling threatened by upstart conservative alternatives, but after researching I don't think there's much more to this than "Red Tribe likes this, so it must be bad". Or perhaps I am not blackpilled enough yet to believe that the slope is so slippery that pedophiles are already being introduced into the pantheon of Letter People.

Other titbits I want to mention:

  • Ticket buyers are "predominately female", and a third of the audience is Hispanic.
  • The movie's conception predates QAnon, and production was around when QAnon was starting but not yet known to the mainstream.
  • The movie has a CinemaScore of A+ (the highest) and is the only movie currently in theaters with that rating. The score is measured by polling theater atendees as they leave the screening and is often used by the industry to gauge audience reaction.

[1] https://ourrescue.org/ [2] https://ourrescue.org/blog/51-survivors-of-human-trafficking-freed-in-greece [3] https://www.deseret.com/2018/6/4/20646317/actor-jim-caviezel-set-to-play-second-most-important-role-in-o-u-r-story-the-sound-of-freedom [4] https://variety.com/2023/film/box-office/sound-of-freedom-box-office-success-1235664837/ [5] https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-reviews/sound-of-freedom-jim-caviezel-child-trafficking-qanon-movie-1234783837/ [6] https://twitter.com/Harry__Faulkner/status/1679207525495844865 [7] https://people.com/crime/ali-landrys-father-in-law-and-brother-in-law-found-dead-in-mexico/

Stuff like this is why I come here. I don’t mind criticism of a movement provided it’s based in facts. And what bothers me about most of the criticisms of both them film and the organization is based more on “yuck” emotions than facts. The critics to my knowledge haven’t pointed to fabricated parts of the movie or even the financial statements of the organization itself.

I find the “yuck” emotion writing tends to discredit the opposition to the idea in question just because to my mind, if you had real reason to distrust the movie or the organization that’s what you’d talk about. Instead it’s been wall to wall “oh my god, can you believe this MAGA Qanon movie is actually being shown in theaters, and people are not only going to eww see it but actually shudder like it!” It’s a terrible way to get people to listen to your opposition to the film simply because it cannot articulate why it’s wrong or why OUR isn’t exactly on the up and up.

I mean we agree, OUR seems much more interested in funding pet projects through grants, and my understanding of 50c3s is that it’s hard to track what the money is used on.

This has set them up for the obvious counter from the Right: why are you so mad about a movie where a guy saves children? Child trafficking is bad... right?

The mainstream journalistic reaction to this movie is full of handwringing and non-arguments. But they're not doing it because they're secretly pedos or want to cover for them. Circling the wagons, even if purely on instinct, is natural when you sense that someone is attempting to build an ideological superweapon against you, which Scott described in Weak Men are Superweapons. The whole post is worth reading if you haven't; it's one of his best and quite brief. This passage is most relevant though:

I suggested imagining yourself in the shoes of a Jew in czarist Russia. The big news story is about a Jewish man who killed a Christian child. As far as you can tell the story is true. It’s just disappointing that everyone who tells it is describing it as “A Jew killed a Christian kid today”. You don’t want to make a big deal over this, because no one is saying anything objectionable like “And so all Jews are evil”. Besides you’d hate to inject identity politics into this obvious tragedy. It just sort of makes you uncomfortable.

The next day you hear that the local priest is giving a sermon on how the Jews killed Christ. This statement seems historically plausible, and it’s part of the Christian religion, and no one is implying it says anything about the Jews today. You’d hate to be the guy who barges in and tries to tell the Christians what Biblical facts they can and can’t include in their sermons just because they offend you. It would make you an annoying busybody. So again you just get uncomfortable.

The next day you hear people complain about the greedy Jewish bankers who are ruining the world economy. And really a disproportionate number of bankers are Jewish, and bankers really do seem to be the source of a lot of economic problems. It seems kind of pedantic to interrupt every conversation with “But also some bankers are Christian, or Muslim, and even though a disproportionate number of bankers are Jewish that doesn’t mean the Jewish bankers are disproportionately active in ruining the world economy compared to their numbers.” So again you stay uncomfortable.

Then the next day you hear people complain about Israeli atrocities in Palestine (what, you thought this was past czarist Russia? This is future czarist Russia, after Putin finally gets the guts to crown himself). You understand that the Israelis really do commit some terrible acts. On the other hand, when people start talking about “Jewish atrocities” and “the need to protect Gentiles from Jewish rapacity” and “laws to stop all this horrible stuff the Jews are doing”, you just feel worried, even though you personally are not doing any horrible stuff and maybe they even have good reasons for phrasing it that way.

Then the next day you get in a business dispute with your neighbor. Maybe you loaned him some money and he doesn’t feel like paying you back. He tells you you’d better just give up, admit he is in the right, and apologize to him – because if the conflict escalated everyone would take his side because he is a Christian and you are a Jew. And everyone knows that Jews victimize Christians and are basically child-murdering Christ-killing economy-ruining atrocity-committing scum.

You have been boxed in by a serious of individually harmless but collectively dangerous statements. None of them individually referred to you – you weren’t murdering children or killing Christ or owning a bank. But they ended up getting you in the end anyway.

Depending on how likely you think this is, this kind of forces Jews together, makes them become strange bedfellows. You might not like what the Jews in Israel are doing in Palestine. But if you think someone’s trying to build a superweapon against you, and you don’t think you can differentiate yourself from the Israelis reliably, it’s in your best interest to defend them anyway.

The whole situation is a big culture war W for the right because it's a bad look to get so upset at a movie about a guy fighting child trafficking. But most journalists pushing back against this movie aren't thinking "I'm going to try to suppress this because I'm secretly a pedophile." They're more likely thinking of all the posts on Twitter and Facebook they've seen about the Satantic pedophilic elite, the ones that argue they control most of society and salivate over filling them full of lead.

While most journalists would agree that pedophilia and sex trafficking are bad things, they definitely don't buy into the idea that vast portions of society are controlled by pedos. But they do know that the person who believes this considers journalists as a class, at best, complicit, and at worst, in on it. So when they see a movie about hunting down child traffickers that the kind of person who posts about Satanic pedophilic elites seems to like... The incentives are all there for journalists to use their narrative-setting power to slander it however they can.

I remember there being a similar, but obviously less widespread and institutionalized, uncomfortable reaction on the right to the game Wolfenstein's "Punch a Nazi" ad campaign. This led to a similarly easy gotcha — what's the matter? You don't think Nazis are good, do you?

This kind of statement puts you on bad footing, which of course is entirely the point. But you don't have to be pro-Nazi to notice that the person fantasizing about violence seems to have a much broader definition of the term than you do, and that their definition includes you. Staying silent while they attempt to normalize extra-legal action against you might be ill-advised.

I'll say that I despise the seemingly complete capture of journalism as a field by activists who see it as their duty and right to use their platform to set a progressive agenda. I know a few people in real life in and adjacent to the industry, and they have a genuine antipathy for middle-America, whiteness, religion, etc. The widespread loss of trust in the industry is well-deserved, in my opinion. But I think the "they're all pedos/covering for pedos" line of thinking is either dishonest or misinformed, and may prove to be dangerous down the line.

The whole situation is a big culture war W for the right

I would not start celebrating just yet. War makes a distinction between tactics and strategy. The Republicans have good tactics. Everything from Loudon County, "we're coming for your children", trans sports and now ""MAP""-sympathetic liberals are tactical wins. But strategic wins are nowhere to seen. Hell, it's not clear there even is a strategy.

Supreme court capture was a fortunate strategic win for Republicans. But from a strategic POV, I can't think of anything else that's gone in their favor since 2010-ish. If anything, they've further alienated every institution while refusing to enfranchise new institutions that are favorable or ambivalent towards them.

Every time a tactical win hints towards a long term strategic strategy, the Republicans have shown themselves to be incompetent in pursuing it. Republicans continue to live in the 20th century, as a party of the White-Christians. Now the party of Rural-White-AntiElite-Christians.

Some Hispanics, Asians & Free-Speech-Atheists have landed on their laps, but there have been no real efforts to court them. Each of the conservative arms seem to be fighting on their isolated fronts, with zero communication or attempt at unifying these tactical fights along a single strategic meta-objective. The Tates don't get along with the Petersons. The Rinos don't get along with the Tea Party. The Race Blind don't get along with the White-race essentialists. Yeah, differences exist in all big tents. But, this "Enemy of my enemy" tactical alliance leads to "crabs in a bucket" style strategic failure.

Liberals on the other hand have continued their decades long progress down unified aims of 'destigmatization, equity, removal of individual responsibility and handing over governance to faceless beaurocrats'. It isn't a slippery slope as much as heavy steam roller with immovable momentum in a single direction.

Ironically, Tucker Carlson (despite being exiled from Fox) appears to be the only one who is able to interact with all faces of the American right. In that sense, he does come across as the Republican Jon Stewart. Both of them clearly peddle propaganda, but know how to appear as if they are good faith actors. The know how to keep the public on their side while still getting audience with their party elite. In the long term, Conservatives need to prioritize recovery/reinvention of their institutions. I will start trusting a revival of conservatism when they can reclaim institutions of Prestige.

Towards that goal, I'd look at the success of Israeli and Indian conservatives in institution capture over the decades. Neither have been perfect, and face a ton of criticism in how slow they've been. But, there's stuff to learn. I can speak more for Modi, other's can opine in on the specifics of other successfully executed long term conservative strategies.

First, pick your battles.

Passion of the Christ is not coming back, and no future generation is going to be above 50% white. Gays-Lesbians-and-Bisexuals as a people are here to stay, and blanket bans on abortion will continue to be unpopular.

But that doesn't mean you can't get your wins from elsewhere.

RRR and Kantara were able to successfully outshine Bollywood ( a left liberal stronghold) by heavily inculcating Hindu/Indic themes without calling it as such. The directors of these movies aren't random conservatives. They are just great artists, who happen to draw heavily from Indian myth. Now, South India has developed its entire self-sustaining industry that doesn't depend on kowtowing to Bollywood in order to build an entertainment career. There is a US TV show called Manifest which does something similar. It has a clear Christian undercurrent, but stays vague enough to appeal to large audiences. You can win christian-ish, anti-abortion-ish or even anti-immigration-ish battles..... but you need to pick ones that don't look like dogwhistles. They also need to be a compelling narrative that works in their own right, besides the undercurrents.

Second, pick your alliances.

Modi has stopped trying to win over liberal-arts students at top liberal arts universities. But his strong-man numbers first image appeals more directly to India's vast STEM population. College educated STEM grads are neither religious nor conservative. But, he knows he can make more sense to them than any other group. STEM grads understand the the optimism around boring-but-at-scale policy. STEM grads care about education. So he appeals to NRIs (mostly engineers), obtains favorable foreign Visa deals, talks about hard-infrastructure (toilets, roads) and maintains the support from this group. They might disagree with his religious leanings, but he never talks about those leanings when addressing this group. Of all the institutions that are adversarial towards Modi, STEM universities are the least hostile, and that is an acceptable deal for him.

The Republicans must enfranchise a young group group on the rise. And that means making deals with institutions are 'least-hostile' towards them. Joe Rogan, Tate and Peterson are the obvious faces that appeal to college going future-corporate-leader types. Remember, these people 1 degree of separation from true institutional powers like Huberman and Attia, who call Stanford home. BYU, GMU and similar departments have groups who have agreement with the conservative movement. Contrarian leftists and Enlightened centrists can easily be brought into the fold without needing them to scream allegiances. But maintaining constant interaction with these folks is important. Hell, DARPA funded labs and affirmative-action-agnostic universities like Caltech/MIT also have avenues Republicans could exploit. non-coastal STEM focused public universities like UMich, UWisc, GATech, Purdue also have some possible avenues for alliance.

I could go on, but prestige education, prestige news (in any medium of their choice) and prestige entertainment are essential institutional pillars for any successful movement. As long as conservatives fail at establishing long term strategic progress towards these 3 pillars, all the tactical wins are meaningless.

Circling the wagons, even if purely on instinct, is natural when you sense that someone is attempting to build an ideological superweapon against you,

Yes, but it still can be criticized, because sometimes "my ideological enemies are building a weapon" amounts to "my ideological enemies get to fight fairly". Or to put it another way, the left is so used to privilege that equality looks like repression.

Movies and TV that are deliberately promoting some progressive bugaboo in an unfair way are too common for me to care that somehow, some conservative managed to do the same thing once.

It may be related to a mindset common in the American right, the type of siege mentality that is the justification for a lot of right wing politics. American right wingers tend to want to live on a farm with many guns and shoot at the imposing threats. The pedos are coming for the kids, the taxman is coming for your money, the green people are coming for your car, the FDA is coming to forcibly vaccinated etc. The left does see itself as oppressed but sees more structural oppression rather than conspiratorial oppression and has less of a siege mentality.

The journalists may be picking up on the siege mentality perspective of the film and therefore coding it as right wing.

The Right Wing mentality of the film is the Cowboy-Run-and-Gun attitude of the protags and their org. That if we just gave enough good guys enough guns and enough free rein, they could kill off all the bad guys and rescue all the kids. The failure to do so is a failure of determination, of willpower, of courage. ((I suppose for some absurd value of enough they would be right: if we devoted the entire resources and budget of the US Marine corps to tracking down traffickers it would make it harder))

The left wing liberal mentality is that

Most often, sexual abusers know the child they abuse but are not relatives.

In fact, about 60% of perpetrators are non-relative acquaintances, such as a friend of the family, babysitter, or neighbor (presumably clerical and teacher abuse fit in here? - FHM).

About 30% of those who sexually abuse children are relatives of the child, such as fathers, uncles, or cousins.

Strangers are perpetrators in about 10% of child sexual abuse cases.

Always the left wing liberal solution is something-something structural causes, combined with government surveillance and intrusion into family and private relationships.

Left wing liberals argue that claiming you're anti-pedo so you spend your time running around with guns "tracking down traffickers" is like claiming you're anti-hunger so you spend your time ordering sandwiches from Quiznos for random people: somewhere between wildly ineffective altruism and actively distracting from the reality. It might make some former DHS agents feel like big men, but it doesn't do much to help kids.

ETA: The near perfect inverse parallel is the BLM argument made by many conservatives that Floyd-Style police killings, while unfortunate, are a drop in the bucket compared to Black-on-Black crime. So saying BLM and opposing police is going to cost Black Lives.

Agree + emphasizing the last line: "...prove to be dangerous down the line." This has always been my contention with Wokeness going back to, at least, the emergence of Jordan Peterson. The left seems to be creating it's opposition through its actions and it's extremely dangerous if you're a person who actually cares about progressive and liberal values. The reaction will be reactionary and that's bad.

I'll second @huadpe's caveat about the organization possibly grifting, but what strikes me about the reviews is how much like propaganda they seem. They're all about how the wrong people like the movie and who the people involved are associated with.

Rolling Stone:

the mostly white-haired audience around me could be relied on to gasp, moan in pity, mutter condemnations, applaud, and bellow “Amen!” at moments of righteous fury

and

organization has far-right affinities

Vice:

The film [...] has been accompanied by a fusillade of laudatory statements from personalities including Mel Gibson, who Ballard claims gave OUR “valuable intelligence” that led to the group and its partners breaking up a pedophile ring in Ukraine, motivational speaker and longtime OUR backer Tony Robbins, and Matt Schlapp, the chair of the Conservative Political Action Conference. [...] It’s also getting approving write-ups from faith-based publications like Catholic World Report and The Christian Post.

There's a ton of weasely connotation-laden words as well: "ilk", "relentless", "hackneyed", the aforementioned audience's "bellow"s, etc. It's hardly worth selecting quotes because the entirety of the articles is like this.

I guess this is valuable to people who are left-aligned but didn't know they're supposed to hate this movie.

Gasp! The Catholics like this movie! Well that tells us all we need to know! 🤣

Honestly, with reactions like this, why do they wonder that people go "Okay, groomer"?

This has set them up for the obvious counter from the Right: why are you so mad about a movie where a guy saves children? Child trafficking is bad... right? These commenters point out how outlets like Rolling Stone defended Cuties (the infamous Netflix movie about pubescent girls dancing in modern sexually charged style) and didn't seem to have a problem with Taken, the 2008 movie with an obviously exaggerated human trafficking plot. But that was a decade and a half ago, and we know why this is happening now: it's culture war, pure and simple. While Righties are accusing the Lefties of covering up for their corrupt pedo elites, I theorized this might be legacy media feeling threatened by upstart conservative alternatives, but after researching I don't think there's much more to this than "Red Tribe likes this, so it must be bad". Or perhaps I am not blackpilled enough yet to believe that the slope is so slippery that pedophiles are already being introduced into the pantheon of Letter People.

The culture war angle is even simpler- Jim Caviezel is One Of The Bad People, so nothing he does can be good. Nevermind that he took credit but wasn't the brains behind the operation. It's straightforwards cancel culture dynamics against the heir apparent to Mel Gibson.

I don't follow Hollywood and didn't know anything about Caviezel before writing this, so I missed this angle, but it sounds plausible. There's definitely a larger "red vs blue" dynamic here, however, given how much space the articles dedicate to trashing the audiences.

Directing me to this guy has led me to some truly bizarre works about Mormonism and American history. Ballard wrote three books - The Lincoln Hypothesis, The Washington Hypothesis, and The Pilgrim Hypothesis - arguing that Lincoln was inspired and influenced by the Book of Mormon, that Washington was a pious proto-Mormon setting the stage for the restoration of the saints, and that the Pilgrims were prophetically guided to America in order to create Mormonism. It all seems quite bizarre, and if this positive review is to be believed, he supports British Israelism?

I realise that's not directly relevant to the culture war angle of this film, and he and his charity can have done wonderful things even if he's a fruit loop in terms of historical and theological knowledge, but... wow, this is a reminder to me of how strange the Mormon world can get.

Addendum: I was able to find a copy of the book. Yep, there's very straightforward British Israelism here, complete with nonsense about Saxons meaning 'Saac's sons'.

Even if the guy is a fruit-loop, that leads us back into the wider argument about separating the artist from the art. Is the movie a good movie as a movie? If there isn't a ten minutes post-credits harangue about everyone should become a Mormon, then even if the guy is a Mormon, so what?

If people on the right were objecting to a movie because the director is a gay predator, imagine what the likes of Rolling Stone would have to say about that.

Lincoln was inspired and influenced by the Book of Mormon, that Washington was a pious proto-Mormon setting the stage for the restoration of the saints, and that the Pilgrims were prophetically guided to America in order to create Mormonism.

The first is silly but mostly harmless. The other two (especially the last) are practically Mormon doctrine. The idea is that God organized things so that a country with religious liberty would be created.

if this positive review is to be believed, he supports British Israelism?

Would love to hear more about this. Sounds like he was being literal unfortunately, but just want to confirm he's not being metaphorical? Mormon doctrine believes that everyone on Earth will be "adopted" into one of the tribes of Israel and given a purpose/duty based on which tribe they are adopted into.

He's not being metaphorical.

Chapter two of The Pilgrim Hypothesis is a straightforward introduction to British Israelism. He argues that the lost tribes migrated northwest into Europe where they interbred with Germanic tribes, and the introduction of Hebrew to ancient German caused the first Germanic sound shift.

Specifically, he interprets Genesis 49:22 ("Joseph is a fruitful bough, a fruitful bough by a spring; his branches run over the wall") to mean that Joseph's descendants must have come to America - 'the wall' is the Atlantic Ocean. Therefore he also wants to connect the Pilgrims to the biological descendants of Joseph. A Mormon elder argued this in the 1880s, you see, so now that needs to be justified somehow. It seems like this has been a line in Mormonism for a while? He cites another early pamphlet - it seems of a piece with Mormon pseudohistory about Native Americans. He relies heavily on this piece as well, and dodgy etymological arguments.

At times it gets rather comical. He does rely on nonsensical folk etymologies ('Saxons' as 'Isaac's sons', 'British' as 'berit', covenant, plus 'ish', man, etc.), many of which rely on outright false claims (he claims that 'angle' is Hebrew for bull, which it... isn't). There's also a lot of conspiratorial nonsense about symbols. The Great Seal of the United States has some biblical imagery on it (e.g. the stars above the eagle's head form a Star of David, surrounded by rays of light and clouds, reminiscent of Moses' trip up Sinai), which apparently proves something. British monarchs wear a crown with twelve jewels on it (do they? I can't tell which crown he's talking about, and St. Edward's Crown has a lot more than twelve stones on it) and there were twelve tribes of Israel. He mistakes the portcullis symbol of parliament for a breastplate and then says it's reminiscent of the Urim and Thummin.

It's genuinely that bizarre. I feel I need to prove I'm not just making this up:

“British history reflects the reunion of Israel,” Stephen explained. “This window is not a coincidence. Nor is it a coincidence that the sovereigns who are coroneted here are adorned with a crown—a crown with exactly twelve jewels embedded around it. Nor is it coincidence that the symbols on the Arms of Westminster are adorned with the breastplate of the high priest of Israel.”

[a picture of the breastplate worn by the priests of Israel alongside the portcullis arms of Westminster]

I had seen that familiar breastplate symbol throughout London, with its grid-like shape creating exactly twelve spaces, presumably to hold twelve jewels, one for each tribe. The breastplate symbol also included a looped chain on each side, presumably showing how easy this breastplate could be fitted onto a high priest. It was familiar to me from LDS gospel art depictions of the high priests of ancient Israel, who used the breastplate, according to scripture, as a Urim and Thummim (Exodus 28:30).

“The breastplate,” Stephen explained, “is the principal symbol of Britain’s Houses of Parliament.”

Or on the names:

Other scholars have noted the interesting construct of words like England and Anglo-Saxon. The word England might be derived from the word Angle-land—the Angles being a Germanic tribe that migrated to the British Isles during the fifth and sixth centuries BC. Angle is a Hebrew word meaning “Bull” or “Ox.” These animals are the biblical symbol for Joseph, as in, “Let the blessing come upon the head of Joseph . . . His glory is like the firstlings of his bullock” (Deuteronomy 33:16–17). Other examples of the same are also very present in the biblical account.

Saxon also has a fascinating proposed origin. Some scholars propose that it has its origins in the name Isaac. Dropping the I from Isaac (vowels are not used in Hebrew spelling) leaves us with Saac. God told Abraham: “In Isaac shall thy seed be called” (Genesis 21:12; see also Romans 9:7; Hebrews 11:18). The Israelites are called “the house of Isaac” (Amos 7:16). If the theory is correct, the Anglo-Saxons were derived from this same biblical house—they are “Isaac’s sons.” Or in Hebrew, they are “Saac’s sons”—hence the name Saxons.

Yes, he appears to have mixed up BC and AD.

It's all like this - a series of coincidences held together with thumbtacks and spit, so that he can declare that the Pilgrims' voyage and the founding of America satisfies some sort of biblical prophecy.

Disney's PR team is very very good at manipulating entertainment reporters and online forums. They no how to kick up a mob to attack a competing movie.

Reviewing films is actually quite hard. You get to watch them once and you need to come out with some kind of take based on your notes. You need to do this with multiple movies. Often they are watched without much of a break.

So there's plenty of room for a friendly PR person to offer some notes about other studios movies that are easy to string into an article.

My take is that Disney is upset about TSOF embarrassing the new Indiana Jones movie and in response they are kicking up a culture war storm. A lot of reporters are joining in the gang pile because it's fun and easy.

Beyond that, a lot of people in DC at places like the State Department see the cartels as useful. The CIA has most likely been co-ordinating & manipulating them quite a bit over the years.

Movies that paint the cartels as scary badasses who are just trying to make money getting cocaine to consenting adults are OK.

Movies that point to child exploitation or fentanyl deaths in the US make the CIA look bad by association, so they are attacked.

Reviewing films is actually quite hard. You get to watch them once and you need to come out with some kind of take based on your notes. You need to do this with multiple movies. Often they are watched without much of a break.

This is sort of true, but only if you succumb to all the bullshit fluff the pr people push on you. Even if you watch 3 films back to back with only 15 minutes between them, it's not hard to make detailed notes to build your review from - as long as you don't spend each break trying to max out the pr firm's open bar tab or simping for whichever featured extra they convinced to come along.

It's true that big studios like Disney are very good at manipulating entertainment reporters and critics, but part of the job of being a critic is not allowing that manipulation to work. Or it should be, it's supposed to be. But progressives like blacklists when they are in charge, so critics have to play nice or else they don't get access. But society has no obligation to print or listen to a bunch of chucklefucks lying about what they watch to keep their jobs, like some kind of sinecure.

Could you provide some supporting evidence for why you believe this movie's criticism is due to separate conspiracies by Disney, the State Department, and the CIA?

How does Disney benefit from attacking a movie that, at the time of the rolling stones article, had earned 25% of what Indiana Jones had done at the domestic box office?

Why would the CIA be particularly troubled by this movie showing the cartels involved in human trafficking, but not others?

Why would the State Department's main lever of shutting a movie down to be releasing negative critical reviews after release, as opposed to a myriad of powers it could presumably exercise for a movie by a former DHS employee that was partially filmed in California?

The State Department and the CIA aren't really separable in this context, CIA agents use State Department covers at embassies and they coordinate with State Department staff.

It isn't some formal policy, it's the DC dinner party circuit. DOS/CIA employees have been dropping sly hints about using the cartels to look cool at dinner parties for years. A movie comes out about how their cartel friends are sexually exploiting children. They respond by going on a tear to any reporter who will listen about this evil Q-Anon conspiracy movie.

The movie you linked to doesn't seem to involve the Latin American cartels and only made $20k at the box office, so I imagine there wasn't much discussion.

DHS isn't one of the "cool" agencies. ICE agents don't get invited to the good parties to tell stories.

Disney using their PR staff and entertainment reporter contacts to attack their competitors hardly seems like some far flung conspiracy I need to prove. SOF's success is an embarrassment not just for Disney but for all of the big distributors. The number 2 film for July 14th weekend is distributed by Angel Studios. That undercuts the perceived power of the major distributors.

However Angel Studios lacks the skills and connections to defend the movie.

Arguing about revenue at the time of the article isn't a good metric. Disney has people monitoring other movies and using various metrics to predict their success.

Disney had a whole lot invested in Indy 5. Wikipedia lists it as the 13th most expensive film ever made and there are rumours that Kathleen Kennedy has been playing with the books because the real cost is even higher. It's the first LucasFilm release since Rise of Skywalker in 2019. It was expected to gross over $1B.

And it came in behind Sound of Freedom in it's third week at the box office.

Disney is struggling. They may have to fire Kennedy over that.

Disney attacking the movie out of anger and desperation, not because it's an effective strategy.

a CBC Radio columnist saying it was "a dog whistle for xenophobic Pro-Trump, Pro-Life types"

Yeah, I'm head-desking right now because how ideological do you have to be in order to go "pro-lifers think child sex trafficking is bad, and we all know pro-lifers are scum" without realising that you are within a gnat's whisker of going "which means child sex trafficking is a Good Thing that Our Side must and should support"?

They were acquired by Disney, who shelved the movie (Disney later claimed they had no knowledge of the movie, which is plausible given the enormity of both Disney and the former Fox).

I'm not surprised by this because it often happens after take-overs; the new owners aren't interested in the projects the former independent entity were working on, or the new guys scrap projects in favour of their own pet projects. The irony here is that Disney sat on it and sold it back, pretty clearly because they thought it was some niche thing that wouldn't appeal to many, and now it's outdoing their tentpole Indiana Jones movie, a movie they really needed to be a hit after the recent string of less than impressive performances.

I even understand the suspicion about "this is a Christian outfit" but honestly, if you can't even bring yourself to agree with the Bible-bashers that kidnapping and selling kids for sex is a bad thing, I suggest you take a look at your life and your choices. And from what I understand from reviews, this isn't a movie that is all "Y'all need Jesus" and "God saved these children". But the guy depicted/his wife may be religious (in clips the actress playing her is wearing a cross), so is that now a big no-no in the movie making business? 'Oh it has an unrealistically positive ending!' okay, and? That's the movies for ya!

Even crusty old drink-sodden Youtube reviewers liked it!

Ticket buyers are "predominately female", and a third of the audience is Hispanic.

'Cos the victims in it are Hispanic children. Hmmm, why on earth would that appeal to a Hispanic audience, and not our big superhero movie with a Hispanic side character? Ponder, ponder....

Or perhaps I am not blackpilled enough yet to believe that the slope is so slippery that pedophiles are already being introduced into the pantheon of Letter People.

MAPs, darling. "Paedophile" is sooo judgemental and offensive to people struggling with their sexuality who are non-offending. That term and that attitude forces them to interalise social stigma. And it engenders hysteria such as this about scholarly work.

There's always room for another stripe on the Progress Pride flag, and if the LGBT community don't want that right now, give it a couple of years until the softhearted and softheaded sociologists work on normalising such attractions.

There's always room for another stripe on the Progress Pride flag, and if the LGBT community don't want that right now, give it a couple of years until the softhearted and softheaded sociologists work on normalising such attractions.

It amuses me how many people still think there's support in the LGBT community to normalize pedophilia, given that community used to be significantly more supportive of pedophilia and has been backpedaling on it for decades. What they want to normalize is child sexuality, not creepy adults exploiting it. It's no different than the feminist argument against modesty: women [children] should be free to do what they want without men [pedophiles] sexualizing them for it. Hence Cuties.

That is not a way that anything can work.

Victorian-style purity standards applied to men, not women, certainly seems...interesting. Women are allowed to be sexual; men are expected to be chaste and virtuous. This would be an interesting thing indeed.

"Being considered an appropriate topic for any setting and company" is not the same thing as "not pretending it doesn't exist, or that's it's horrible and evil when it does exist".

Well - when looking at the spectrum between "shut down all mention of sexuality and let them figure it out naturally on the wedding night" and "be so open that some people are selling fetish gear to children", what I see is that one extreme is totalizing and bad in itself, while the other's bad parts are the outliers. Much as people here love to mention "kids getting dollars in their underwear in strip clubs", I have never actually encountered people who would endorse that, or endorse similar enough things, in the wild.

It's common advice to "give your children the Talk, or the streets will". Since not all parents follow that advice, I'd rather there be people whose job it is to openly give children the Talk, so they do not have to turn to less official and less scrutinized sources.

More comments

As soon as it was just barely socially possible to strip on camera for internet strangers without suffering perpetual banishment from polite middle class society, OnlyFans became a phenomenon.

Poor women, forced to strip for internet strangers by... who? Men don't go around telling women, "wow, you're so hot. You should totally start an OnlyFans so I can look at pictures of your hoo-ha for $10 a month". Nor do they go around claiming that it's liberating and all progressive young women that are sufficiently attractive should seize the day and sell pictures of their hoo-ha for $10 per viewer per month while it's still pretty.

Poor women, forced to strip for internet strangers by... who?

Not forced, probably. Though there are examples of women working where they have to pay a house fee to rent their internet connected performance stage / bedroom while their travel documents are held for 'safe keeping' by their landlord / manager / pimp. I'll happily concede this is not the majority.

There's been some coverage on Andrew Tate who we are told is lots of -ists, it remains to be seen what the outcome of his legal difficulties will be.

Leonid Radvinsky is the man behind onlyfans, though not it's founder, he made it much pornier than it had been initially. Arguably onlyfans has one of the more transparent ownership structures.

young women that are sufficiently attractive should seize the day and sell pictures of their hoo-ha for $10 per viewer per month while it's still pretty

It may not be 'men' promulgating this message, but it's a message that is being heard by a cohort of women. Along with the message that this isn't a degenerate choice and anyone shaming you for choosing totally non-degenerate 'sex work' is misogynist, culturally backwards, insufficiently sex-positive, controlling, etc.

Leonid Radvinsky is the man behind onlyfans, though not it's founder, he made it much pornier than it had been initially.

And ironically this is part of the feminist opposition to pornography: it's men who run it and make money out of it, even if women involved claim to be empowered and liberated and really love the work and it's sex positive and all the rest of it. There's a lot of young women scraping pennies with OnlyFans accounts who hope to become one of the few big success stories. Meanwhile, I'm guessing Mr. Radvinsky is not scraping pennies and has never had to flash his tatas to make money out of the platform.

I appreciate your tone.

On another reading, I think I understand your point: adult men unconsciously generate a massive demand for sex and sexual/sexualized content simply by existing, it's like a huge reservoir of potential energy that won't go away. Anyone of any gender who consciously tries to make a new hole in the dam that is storing that pent-up desire instead of shoring it up or at least leaving it alone knows that at least some women will be drawn to that new stream of male attention and that far from all of them will benefit from it.

But this draws a different response from me: what does shoring up the dam look like? If men do it, it will look like Saudi Arabia or Ancient Athens, with male guardians policing the sexuality of their charges (and yet Athens still had its prostitutes and I'm sure SA does as well). If women do it, it will be a radfem utopia (or dystopia?), with women actually forming a gender-wide class consciousness and punishing those among their ranks who try to benefit from their own sexuality. Or do you have a third answer to this question of your own?

I mean in the historical west modesty and sexuality norms were mostly policed by other women, even if men had legal responsibility, so I don't think there's as much daylight between the two options as you're representing.

Ten years ago liberals would have sworn to you that Sista Soulja style "whiteness is the devil" rhetoric was dead and gone, and would never come back.

And now we know that they were deliberately hiding and nurturing it for over two decades, bringing it out of the closest at the first possible opportunity. When a group treats all interactions as tactical engagements to shift the overton window, that's exactly what happens: the quiet part stays quiet, until a memo goes out and suddenly the absurd strawman extremist position is once again party doctrine.

So we already have one example of an extreme leftist position that was pushed out of the overton window only to return far stronger than before, apparently with the assistance of liberals with a no-enemies-to-the-left policy. Why will this be any different?

There's also the point that only heterosexual age-gap relationships seem to disgust progressives. 8 year old boys in stripper dresses getting cash tucked into their panties by adult men is a library activity, while girls getting married at 17 has been made a crime. This means we're a lot closer to the days of the Berlin adoption agencies giving boys to paedophiles than you'd think from the rhetoric about "predatory (straight) men"

So we already have one example of an extreme leftist position that was pushed out of the overton window only to return far stronger than before, apparently with the assistance of liberals with a no-enemies-to-the-left policy. Why will this be any different?

The usual argument for abolishing the AoC is about individual freedom. That's very much not an extreme leftist position; it's an extreme liberal position - a libertine position.

SJ is sometimes called "the successor ideology" because it grew out of liberal culture but is not liberal itself. The direction you go from moderate liberalism to get to SJ is at an obtuse angle with the direction you'd have to go to get to abolishing the AoC. And I say that as someone who wants to lower the AoC.

Does SJ memory-hole stories about gay molestors and occasionally enable them*? Yes. That's because they're optimising too hard on "accept gay people" - to quote B5, "conspiracies of silence because the larger ideals have to be protected". It's not because they actually support child molestation in and of itself.

*The conservative media amplifies this for the exact same reason the SJ media suppresses it i.e. it is highly politically inconvenient for the Blue Tribe narrative. It's not actually as common as reading conservative media would lead you to believe.

not actually as common as reading conservative media would lead you to believe

Which variety of child sexual abuse? The sort where two men adopt / foster boys they abuse and sometimes produce pornography with or the sort where homosexual men will invite teen boys that are 'old souls' to pool parties for leering, letchery, drug use, and also sometimes pornography production?

I find both unacceptable. I suspect the latter is more common than the former. I also suspect the latter is more acceptable in the letch community.

How common does conservative media lead people to believe it is? I'm certain there are unreported instances of both occurring this weekend. Given the current year acceptance of alphabetism, isn't it likely there's more of this abuse now than anytime in the last 40 years?

A gay teen boy going to a gay pool party in a Speedo where lots of gay non-teens will offer him alcohol and feel him up is bad and creepy, for the same reasons that a heterosexual teen girl going to a pool party in a string bikini where adult men will give her alcohol and feel her up is bad and creepy. But neither are pedophilia and most people find it hard to get worked up about the former happening to someone else’s son, just like they would find it hard to get worked up about someone else’s son going to a cougar pool party in a Speedo where adult women will let him drink and feel him up. I suspect that the first scenario is more common than the other two combined, possibly by a very large margin, but it’s not something that conservative media dwells on a lot.

Alcohol and a grope, likely undersells it. Many would feature hard drugs and sexual assault, the Bryan Singer senario.

More comments

What I said was that SJers enabling gay molestors is not as common as conservative media would have you believe.

Haven't they enabled all they've failed to call to account?

Arguably they've enabled all the molesters the SJ activism has camouflaged or hidden. SJ work to normalize homosexuals has enabled a non-zero number of molesters.

I understand not all homosexuals offend. In the same way 'not all men'.

I'm saying that "SJer spots gay molestor, doesn't report it to authorities because doesn't want to appear homophobic" is a real thing but not nearly as common as conservative media would have you believe (though much more common than SJ media would have you believe), in both cases because it's highly politically inconvenient for SJ.

"SJ journalist hears about gay molestor being arrested, doesn't report on it to the public", that's basically standard practice. But this isn't as directly harmful; the molestor is in jail whether or not we know about it.

Counterpoints:

You can be "amused" by this all you like. Beyond a certain point, acting as if people concerned about the pro-paedophilia contingent of LGBTQ+ activism are just tilting at windmills strikes me as gaslighting.

Actually the scary part is that the LGBT movement has more or less flipped the stranger danger on its head. What’s being normalized is keep the parents out of the loop and almost presenting parents as “the enemy of their children,” and normalizing structures in society that actually work against parents being able to find out where their kids are and what they’re doing online (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.app.calculator.vault.hider&hl=en_US) for a quick example, is an app that exists strictly to hide apps (and thus online communication with strange adults and other potentially dangerous behavior). Schools have been very open — to the point of creating policies forbidding disclosure without the child’s permission— of helping children of varying ages, down to elementary school, hide sexual secrets from their parents.

I was a kid in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and I can remember the fear parents had of the internet being available to kids — because they might talk to strangers. We were warned, repeatedly, not to talk to anyone online we didn’t know in person. There were hysterical news reports about Pictochat on the Nintendo DS — because it enabled a child to talk to a strange adult without notifying their parents (even though you had to share information in person first). And obviously there was the stranger danger stuff where any adults who took a particular interest in children were to be reported to your parents immediately, and adults were not taking any of it lightly.

Obviously, this was overkill, but the switch is mind boggling to me. We’ve gone from a fear that an adult might be talking to a kid without parents knowing about it to treating the very idea that parents might want to keep other adults from talking to their kindergartners about sex without their knowledge or consent— including not informing them about what the child is saying about his/her sexuality— as the default position.

Obviously, this is the part pedophiles like more than anything else. Kids now take it as a given that parents are not to be told about their sexuality. That sexual thoughts and feelings are not to be talked about with the parents who know them best. That loving adults want to help you with your sexuality and that in order to do that keep it a secret from your parents. Which almost every advocate group trying to prevent child sexual abuse says is one of the common occurrences in child sexual abuse (https://rainn.org/articles/talking-your-kids-about-sexual-assault) the child is made to keep secrets and often fears punishment if they tell. Now, we teach that exact thing in every classroom in the country and don’t see the irony.

Actually the scary part is that the LGBT movement has more or less flipped the stranger danger on its head.

Not the only thing that was in the current year flipped without anyone caring and even noticing.

Even more jarring is transformation of people who were preaching "violence bad! guns bad! self defense bad! human life sacred under any circumstances!" into avid flag waving patriots "glory to ukraine! glory to heroes! death to orcs! no surrender, no step back! throw the moskal to the shark!", without even bothering to justify this abrupt change of their principles.

(yes I know there were never any "principles" involved, but it is still jarring)

There's a big issue that needs better policing, self- or other-wise, but I'd caution some of these examples aren't particularly good ones. In particular, the actual proposal from Tatchell was :

One alternative option might be to introduce a tiered age of consent, where sex involving under-16s would cease to be prosecuted, providing both partners consent and there is no more than two or three years difference in their ages. This system operates in Germany, Israel and Switzerland...

Any review of the consent laws should be premised on five aims. First, ending the criminalisation of consenting relationships between teens of similar ages. Second, protecting young people against sex abuse. Third, empowering them to make responsible sexual and emotional choices. Fourth, removing the legal obstacles to earlier, more effective sex and relationship education. Fifth, ensuring better contraception and condom provision to prevent unwanted pregnancies and abortions and to cut the spread of sexual infections like HIV.

That is, essentially a Romeo and Juliet law. There are some good arguments against these laws: there's a lot of potential for abuse with a lot of the covered age ranges, even within same-age relationships in these age ranges, there are pragmatic arguments against people this age having even safe and consensual sex, and far more than the general sphere this subject is especially vulnerable to the Murder-Ghandi problem.

But they are extremely far from the central case for pedophilia.

given that community used to be significantly more supportive of pedophilia and has been backpedaling on it for decades.

The usual argument is that they kicked out NAMBLA et al from the movement in order to gain mainstream acceptance, amd now that they have it and homosexuality has been normalized they are returning to their original goals (and more).

I don’t think it passes the smell test that LGBT people, or the movement, or a representative sampling of the movement’s leaders, or the smoke-filled back room where George Soros, the local Masonic lodge head, and some lizard people decide the aims of the LGBT movement, are pro pedophilia. I think that it’s very defensible to claim that gay male sexual norms around consent, the age thereof, harassment, and the like would be very, very bad to have adopted more widely, and that LGBT leaders have a history of overlooking pedophiles among their supporters alternating with purging them, and that trans activism prioritizes trans stuff over well established institutional knowledge for child protection and that the combination thereof will probably be used as cover for pedophilia at some point, either of the ‘kind of a creep with teenagers’ kind or of the kind this movie is about. I think it’s further fair to say that culture war dynamics might prevent that from getting shut down.

I think that it’s very defensible to claim that gay male sexual norms around consent, the age thereof, harassment, and the like would be very, very bad to have adopted more widely

I don’t think it passes the smell test that LGBT people, or the movement... are pro pedophilia

Those two statements seem directly in contradiction to me

Gay male culture seems like a survival of 70’s macho sexually aggressive norms, which includes a lot of having sex with teens being socially acceptable. Obviously that’s a different thing from out and out pedophilia, and it gets treated differently at least when gay men do it(probably more because society doesn’t actually care that much about teenaged boys having sex with adults, even if it’s technically illegal and their parents probably aren’t thrilled, than because LGBT gets special privileges).

So they were all secretly pro-paedophilia but kept it a secret for 30 years? You would think with such an enormous conspiracy there'd be a whistleblower at some point. Surely there are people in LGBT circles who are high-ranking enough that they would be in on it but who don't actually support paedophilia.

The argument usually isn't that there's an explicit conspiracy by the LGBT community, simply that LGBT and pedophilia are natural fellow travellers. And given the enormously higher chance that gays and lesbians were sexually abused as kids and/or had significant inappropriate sexual experiences as a kid*, combined with the higher likelihood of those who were sexually abused as children to themselves become pedophiles**, the basic idea isn't that far fetched.

*: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11501300/

**: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2082860/

I don’t think it works that way. It’s more that the organizations were kicking out NAMBLA over optics not principles, and should those optics no longer be a problem, then they stop policing the ranks for pedophilia.

A big difference is that an adult can understand that flaunting sexuality can and often does make you appear as a sexual object to other people. An adult woman understands that going out in a string bikini is going to attract sexual attention and she knows to keep it to places where she wants that kind of attention. Children don’t understand sexuality that way, and don’t understand the consequences of being sexually attractive to adults. A woman knows that walking down a street alone at night dressed to highlight her sexuality increases the risk of rape. So women generally reserve their “looking sexy” times to going out on the town with other adults she trusts. To a child, it’s just dress up, and they don’t really understand that you can’t just put on a sexy top without attracting sexual attention from others or understanding the implications of attracting that sexual attention. They just want to play dress up barbie.

That is the status quo they are fighting against though. In their ideal world, "flaunting sexuality" wouldn't make you appear as a sexual object to other people unless you intend it to. The fact that it does today is seen as a problem and rather than putting the onus on women/children to not flaunt their sexuality, they prefer to put the onus on the men/pedophiles to not perceive them doing so as sexual.

If the position is that people shouldn't perceive others flaunting their sexuality as a sexual display, then I'm not sure what kind of sensible argument there is to be had. I don't even think anyone actually believes that.

This is one of those arguments that is useful in some contexts but will be immediately abandoned in others. It's not a principle or rule, but a tool that is brought out to achieve a particular job and then shelved when it's no longer useful.

In the next breath, we'll be told how it doesn't matter what the speaker meant but rather how it was perceived by the listener that made if offensive.

With this degree of incoherence, it worries me even more that they're pushing sexuality on children, because there is no principle holding that back from going in any direction with it. It's like introducing an uncontrollable pitbull to a room full of toddlers. Sure, he might just play gently with the children, or he might not. Better to keep him from the children in the first place.

This kind of insane idealism can be worse than malice.

deleted

On Pitbull owners it’s sort of a test for me for stupidity (maybe mean and too hot). It’s either people bad at math, lacking empathy, or just never saw the statistics. While pits going out and hurting/killing a loved one isn’t a gigantic risks it does happen a lot. And you have a ton of other options of mid-sized family pet dog where you don’t run risks your entire family hates you for life because you dog maimed mom it seems like an easy decision. I don’t know the exact probabilities of that happening but removing a .1% chance of that happening for basically free seems like a good deal.

I think I saw someone go through the dog statistics ages ago, but I'm guessing dog attacks just havent been in the news lately. Wait until the next time there's a high-visibility culture-war adjacent dog bite or police shooting of a dog, and I'm sure it'll be plastered all over the thread.

I don't even think anyone actually believes that.

Roughly 50% of the adult population believe that enough to try and impose policy preferences based on it; this is why the claim of "victim blaming" is effective in the first place. This view skews massively female for obvious reasons.

To be fair to your other point, though, the people who believe this also form a core part of the same demographic that's currently "pushing sexuality on children"- which is also why that claim is a bit incoherent, and perhaps more accurately stated as "treat the young as if they were all women, especially the boys; man bad/foreign/unstable, women good/domestic/stable".

The trouble is that such a thing is impossible. The sex drive is one of the strongest biological drives except maybe food. To ask a person to not notice a person displaying secondary sex characteristics is to ask a hungry crowd to not notice a plate full of hamburgers. That’s just not how biology works.

Adults like to tell themselves that other people shouldn’t notice their sexual displays, but unless the person has very little real-world experience, they understand perfectly well that people don’t actually work the way they want to believe they do. And so while most adults have learned to mouth those platitudes in polite company. But those same people are absolutely not behaving as if they believe that. No business allows overly sexy clothes in the workplace because it’s a distraction. No woman wears skimpy clothing casually to places like the post office or the grocery store.

And again, kids and for that matter adults with autism or other learning disabilities don’t necessarily pick up on this. To a ten year old, if grownups are telling them it’s okay to dress in a sexual manner and that “the adults won’t see you that way” that’s about the end of it. They don’t get that people lie out of a need to formally maintain the narratives they hold dear.

I think that most people are capable of showing restraint; strong emphasis on "most". You also have shit like burkas and Victorians being aroused by women's ankles...and on the other hand, you've got hippies at Burning Man running around buckass naked and calling it good.

Victorians being aroused by women's ankles

Victorians also had porn and it wasn't confined to ankles. There's a lot of post-Victorian bashing of their immediate predecessors that gets repeated in pop culture as "how it was" and it's not necessarily so (as the song goes). You probably wouldn't have much chance of seeing a woman's ankles in ordinary life as women wore boots in the daytime, so seeing ankles would be confined to intimate moments, and that's where the prospect of prurience comes in. The swimsuit covers of Sports Illustrated are not simply showing off female athleticism, after all. In this NSFW article, you can see a postcard of two women with a man, one of the women is wearing boots, and it's not their ankles they are showing off.

Besides, the era of full nudes in art (much debated) isn't swooning over ankles alone.

More comments

Oh, I don't think they support it. But with the whole "take the T out of LGBT" and the trans push against lesbians (and to a lesser extent gay men) over "genital preferences", I think the older-style lot will find the ground going out from under them. Some variants of the new flag include the intersex symbol, which I think is absurd because intersex is a whole different thing.

No, give the sociologists and pyschologists time to agitate that the term should be MAP not paedophile, and that it should be removed from whatever the latest version of the DSM V is as a disorder (just like getting homosexuality reclassified) and the new cutting-edge understanding will be that they too are an oppressed sexual minority and any hold-outs who go "Fuck no, we don't want paedophiles included!" are being - well, whatever the term for "paedophobia" like "homophobia" and "transphobia" will be.

women [children] should be free to do what they want without men [pedophiles] sexualizing them for it. Hence Cuties

As one of the few people who actually bothered to watch Cuties, this may be the perception of how that movie fits into the culture, but it's not apt. The movie is extremely critical of sexualized cultures that young girls inherit from their confusing adult influences. Yes, it also leans into an uncomfortably sensationalistic depiction of that sexualization, and I'm sure it will be found on many unsavory hard drives, but that's not its messaging.

I'm not sure whether you are agreeing with me or misunderstanding me, so I'll clarify why I said 'Hence Cuties'. The behavior of the girls in the movie is intended as part of an exploration and critique of women's experiences. Critics of the film argue that the movie is morally bad because of how the girls are portrayed while supporters argue there is nothing wrong with the movie itself and that it is instead viewers (eg, "pedophiles") who interpret it in a titillating context who are morally in the wrong. That is, women should be free to make a movie about their experiences without men coming along and sexualizing it.

The "it's got a Christian character, therefor it's Christian propaganda," aspect of this story bugs me too. Would we do the same if it was a Jewish person? I'm not sure. If a protagonist said, "My Jewish faith compels me to stop child sex-trafficking," would someone say this was a Jewish movie? I doubt it, but maybe...?

I fear the success of this movie amongst the wrong sorts of people may actually be detrimental to future efforts to fight child sex trafficking. Opposition to pedophilia will become a right-wing boogeyman, mostly disinformation, and, in any case, even if it is real, we will soon learn why it's actually a good thing. We can already see how expressing concern here is being interpreted as a dogwhistle for Qanon. Unfortunately, too many people will be far more horrified by the thought of being mistaken for a Trump supporter than they would at the possibility of indirectly aiding child sex traffickers. Sure, they may quietly, and in private, express their revulsion for pedophilia, but in public one would not want to say too much less the inquisitors get suspicious.

This movie presents an incredible opportunity for actual pedophiles, especially those among the Zeitgeist's activist class.

Perhaps this is uncharitable. No, it's definitely uncharitable. However, if I had made similar claims 20 years ago about transgenderism, then that would have also been uncharitable. Is there are bridge to far? Everyone says that there is, but then many of those people don't seem to have ever seen a bridge they didn't immediately run across, while dragging as many people along with them as they could. Sometimes being uncharitable is the only way to avoid being scammed, again.

God I hope my fear is misplaced.

the success of this movie amongst the wrong sorts of people

I'm going to say this. "The wrong sorts of people" is exactly the shitty attitude that turns off ordinary people from the progressives. "Yes, maybe child sex trafficking is arguably not-great, but if you vote Republican you have no right to that opinion and indeed you are turning away Good Right-Thinking Right Side Of History Folx" does not look good, it looks like "we'd happily defend child-fucking if we thought it would offend you normies".

Which is the fear you are expressing, and I unhappily have to agree.

And notably this attitude was why progressives lost the Virginia governors race.

The left is now experiencing what it felt like on the right when the left was demanding everyone parrot "Black Lives Matter" or else be branded a racist on social media forever. (Which ruined race relations, and became an incredible opportunity for actual racists and eugenics supporters.)

However, if I had made similar claims 20 years ago about transgenderism, then that would have also been uncharitable.

I can't make sense of this. 20 years ago it would be "uncharitable" to think that pro-transgenderism would go far. Then 20 years later it did.

In order to fit your analogy, the backlash to transgenderism would be out of control after 20 years--not transgenderism itself.

Opposition to pedophilia will become a right-wing boogeyman, mostly disinformation, and, in any case, even if it is real, we will soon learn why it's actually a good thing.

Become? It's already a right-wing boogeyman depending on the skin color distribution of the average perpetrator in England- bonus points for actually being the motte definition of, and what most people mean when they say, "pedophilia" (exclusively 'old man, young girl').

This movie presents an incredible opportunity for actual pedophiles

I'm not as convinced; I think this is also a bit Blue-on-Blue (or rather, Blue-on-Redder-Blue) given [for the former] who the traffickers tend to be (favored skin colors tend to be guilty of it more often due to vanishingly few white men in the places the women come from) and [for the latter] that it's a righteous cause that both the people whose moral foundation is "man bad -> man wants prostitution -> prostitution bad" and the people whose moral foundation is "prostitution bad" get a lot of policy mileage out of.

I think it hurts the ability to actually talk about grooming issues and pedophilia simply because as these become right-coded, it becomes harder and harder to take a position against those things without seeming right leaning yourself. And especially in activist and nonprofits, you don’t want to be seen as right wing.

And especially in activist and nonprofits, you don’t want to be seen as right wing.

Which is something that I can understand broadly, but not when it comes to "yeah, we all agree that raping young children is bad". Who the fuck cares if the most raving right-winger who celebrates Hitler's birthday every year is standing beside you when kicking in the door of a place where small children are being raped? That's being too pure.

Hitler's birthday being what it is, it's ironically a somewhat blue-coded holiday in the US...

https://twitter.com/stone_toss/status/1649056653369659393

Hitler's birthday

I had to look that up since I had no idea when Adolf was born, and yes I did recognise that reference 😁

Telling stoners ‘yes, happy hitler’s birthday to you to, are you collecting signatures on a card for his Argentine nursing home?’ Is the best part of the month of April.

Just saw the movie tonight in Phoenix, AZ. You're right about the audience, at my theater it was about 50% female and almost entirely Hispanic. Very big crowd for a film that released ten days ago.

I thought the film was okay -- some nice camera work despite most of the film being shot with a very shallow depth of field (what's up with this? why are films doing this all of a sudden? it's a terrible stylistic choice). The first hour seemed to drag at times, but the second half was pretty exciting.

People are calling the film "politicized" but there is literally zero politics in the plot, or even the undertone. The only message is a plea to pay more attention to child trafficking.

Caviezel's been radioactive for a while and his attachment to this project pretty much guaranteed it was going to be controversial.

A couple of acquaintances of mine and I had a brief talk about this last night. My super-lefty acquaintance is irate that anyone would consider going to see it. He doesn't believe in separating the art from the artist ("we must separate the bad actors from the power structures that enable them") and has an unfortunate tendency for guilt-by-association, so he was suspicious of Ballard by extension. My more centrist acquaintance thinks it's bringing awareness to a under-discussed issue.

I think your experience is broadly what's happening: extreme-lefties will hunker down with the Q-Anon take; Righties will support it's trad values and centrists will look at it, say what's the fuss and become further ostracized from lefty news and culture outlets. This may be going too far, but I'd categorize this as the Left creating its own problems by unecessarily pushing people away.

I think that is a concern for pretty much any non-profit.

A fundraising scam, as distinct from the good old-fashioned Hollywood creative accounting?

Yeah, there may be legitimate questions about the organisation. But until Rolling Stone does an exposé on "how did Patrisse Cullors afford those houses?" (which it seems not to have done, unlike other left-wing aligned outfits which did run stories) then I'm not going to be too outraged. If the guy is working off the back of this movie to fool people into donating, he had to wait five years for the payday.

That doesn't make it right if it's a grift, but it does mean he's been out there all along and they never were bothered - or aware - until now that the movie is doing so well.

At this point being a scam is par for the course. Even our very best minds of rationality and reason found ways to funnel money into dead end policies for criminals.

At this point I'd call it fair to say that you donate money to feel good. There's no reason to assume that any monetary amount will fix anything. If you actually care about an issue you are going to have to do something about it yourself. With that in mind it seems most people don't care all that much.

I don't have a lot of background on this, but the thing I'd be most worried about is the possible extent to which this organization is (at least partly) running a fundraising scam.

I don't have a lot of background on this either, but I'd say if they're a fundraising scam, we'll probably have the details within a few months. It sounds like the mainstream press doesn't like them much, and they're on the radar now.

I purposely kept my focus limited for this piece but I would be curious to know more about OUR. The critical articles throw out some accusations of questionable tactics and effectiveness, but I don't recall anything claiming it's a scam. The credible thing to do, if you wanted to undermine the film, would be to publish a scathing expose of OUR, but that would take effort.

Wouldn't the content that was crowd sourced being released mean that the fundraising isn't a scam?

Oh I thought we were talking about Angel studios who crowdsource fund their films.

Your analysis matches what I've been seeing. I've also been following the Wiki Talk pages on this film which is pretty wild. The argument is that QAnon is a thing, so it's important to note in the Wiki page that this film is...somehow...associated with Q-Anon. To me, it all looks like opinion laundering. Something like, "We've convinced ourselves that Q-Anon is an important conspiracy (because Trump believes some or all of it?) that everyone should be aware of (and against), so now we can point at any tenuous connection to Q-Anon as an obvious problem." The argument is circular.

Here's one line from the wiki page that really stuck out to me:

Caviezel has endorsed the spurious belief that child traffickers drain children's blood to obtain adrenochrome,[53] a chemical with supposed anti-aging properties.[60] Caviezel suggested he had seen evidence of children being subjected to the practice.[62] Caviezel reiterated his belief in the adrenochrome conspiracy theory during the press tour for Sound of Freedom.[63]

First, the word 'spurious' is obvious editorializing (against Wiki's view-from-nowhere) which is unsupported by the linked article, but what's really 'spurious' is the claim that 'adrenochrome' is an obvious conspiracy theory. The take goes like this, "adrenochrome doesn't do what people claim, therefor any reference to this is a conspiracy theory." That should raise some flags because, whether or not Adrenochrome is real, effective, or something Caviezel believes in, has no bearing on whether or not people are killing children for their blood, something Ballard claims having seen numerous times in videos he had to watch for the DHS. AFAICT, there's no dispute (or even discussion) about the claim of blood sacrifice just whether or not Adrenochrome is real or a conspiracy theory. This is a prime example of the kind of reporting/editorializing that sets people on edge.

I've been watching this story develop on various media-critique YouTube channels and it's just bonkers how rapidly this became culture war. If you're a publication on the left, why not simply leave it alone, say nothing? That's the part that's weird to me. From a strategic point, how does this not tip middle-of-the-road Americans toward the conservative viewpoint and further reduce the credibility of these journals? The RS piece is especially egregious, IMO.

Also, the denigration of the film is weirdly anti-Latino. As you correctly pointed out the production is almost entirely Latino and the film has a lot of Spanish with subtitles. It's about to be released in Mexico, at which point, I think we're going to see it get a huge bump. If one considers this a Mexican cinema production (cast, crew, writing and directing are largely Mexican) this is the highest performing Mexican film of all time. It's admittedly a bit of stretch and why I didn't add it to the Mexican Cinema wiki page. I'll let other people have that fight.

Criticism of the movie itself is weak, with the arguments boiling down to "it's not realistic" and "the plot doesn't always make sense", things that could be leveled at any summer blockbuster.

Yes, and those exact criticisms ARE levied by critics at summer blockbusters, all the time. I see that the film has a 74% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which is the same as Elemental and Asteroid City, and better than the Little Mermaid, Indiana Jones and Fast X. Are you sure there is a culture war angle here?

There is actually a summer action thriller out in theaters right now starring an actor known for his membership (and not simply membership - in many ways he's been the mascot) in a controversial organization that's been accused of being a cult, and has been tied to various crimes including fraud, embezzlement, racketeering, stalking, harassment, rape, and abetment of suicide. But have you noticed that the reviews for the latest Mission Impossible film don't bring up Tom Cruise's membership in the Church of Scientology, or his endorsement of Scientology's many anti-medical claims about the field of psychiatry? Why do you think critics prefer to discuss Jim Caviezel's association with QAnon instead?

One big reason people are not bringing up Tom Cruise's Scientology connection is that it is old news. For better or for worse, if a nasty fact has been out there for a long time, people don't bring it up in the discourse as much. This is how the process of un-cancellation works on an individual level (I think broad vibe shifts also have something to do with it). The Scientology thing has been litigated in the court of public opinion for quite some time.

I don’t have an opinion on that, because I try not to make generalizations based on n=2. And, given that Scientology is a religion, whereas QAnon is a political organization, I would certainly want to control for that. I would also want to control for the fact that QAnon has very much been in the news of late, whereas Scientology has not.

  • -21

“Scientology is a religion” is a very feeble deflection, considering that’s very much up for debate, and in fact several governments have refused to consider it a religion, classifying it variously as a scam, a cult and even an organized criminal enterprise. QAnon being in the news of late is very much a function of who makes the news, and this is largely the same cohort that writes movie reviews for major publications. It was quite recently that Danny Masterson was convicted of rape, and his victims went on record accusing the Church of Scientology of harassment and intimidation on his behalf.

QAnon being in the news of late is very much a function of who makes the news, and this is largely the same cohort that writes movie reviews for major publications

That's the point. QAnon is the flavor of the month, so a filmmaker's association with QAnon is more likely to be mentioned. Scientology is yesterday's news, the legal travails of a has-been actor notwithstanding, so a filmmaker's association with Scientology is less likely to be mentioned. This is not a new phenomenon.

in fact several governments have refused to consider it a religion, classifying it variously as a scam, a cult and even an organized criminal enterprise

  1. Not in the United States.
  2. Regardless of whether it is a cult, it is not a political organization. So, the whataboutism still doesn't work.
  • -13

I don’t have an opinion on that, because I try not to make generalizations based on n=2

This is so silly. You can't take scientific language and apply it in any way you'd like. If your parents lavish your brother with attention, encourage him, give him 2 free ferraris when he turns 12, and so on, while locking you in the attic, n(umber of brothers)=2 so you shouldn't generalize about their behavior.

No, n != 2. Yes there are 2 movies involved but there are innumerable critics making the same decisions about those two movies. You don't just get to find a hypothesis, pick a certain aspect about that hypothesis which involves a small number of entities, and decide that since that number of entities is small the hypothesis must be discarded without further evidence. Perhaps there are only 2 brothers, but there's a long chain of consistent behavior to observe and use to inform your conclusions about your parents. Perhaps there are 2 sexes, but there are billions of instances of each sex to observe. Perhaps there are 2 movies, but there are hundreds of critics to observe. n(umber of relevant entities) != 2.

As far as Scientology vs. Qanon, you mentioned wanting to control for one being a political organization. Yes, that's exactly the point. People care about one as a political organization and not the other as a religious organization. You're controlling for the very point which @CriticalDuty made. "Oh well obviously one actor has politics they disagree with, so we should definitely control for that before determining whether critics care about actors' political opinions."

Perhaps there are 2 movies, but there are hundreds of critics to observe. n(umber of relevant entities) != 2. Yes, but I don't have that evidence. At best, I have the claim of some guy on the internet re what the evidence shows.

Oh well obviously one actor has politics they disagree with, so we should definitely control for that before determining whether critics care about actors' political opinions."

But, again, the example you raised -- Tom Cruise -- is about religious belief, not political beliefs. So, you seem to be saying that that example is not germane.Which I agree is the case.

  • -13

The point is that the critics' complaints are explicitly political, rather than actual criticisms of people with crazy beliefs. Tom Cruise is a great example of someone with crazier beliefs who has not received the same criticism, proving that the critics' motivations are partisan, not principled.

I don’t think most people think of Scientology as a religion, more as a hybrid cult and a scam.

I for one see no principled distinction to be made between a religion and a cult. The former all arise from the latter, and they accrue a veneer of respectability from being old, or formed at a time where accusing something of being bad because it was a fresh cult would be met with mild confusion.

They're all scams anyway, even if some of the religious fall for it too. That's how MLMs work.

But you repeat yourself, waaaaHEY!

I feel the spirit of the fedora returning from the 00's!

(But for real, I do feel the spirt coming back. I would bet a small amount that religion is going to renter the culture ware space as a real target in the next couple years.)

(But for real, I do feel the spirt coming back. I would bet a small amount that religion is going to renter the culture ware space as a real target in the next couple years.)

As a veteran Internet Atheist, I sure hope you're wrong. In retrospect the whole enterprise was somewhat undignified in it's heyday, at this point it would be downright perverse.

Then there's the small inconvenient fact that atheists have been proven absolutely wrong about the impact of religion on society, and about what secularization would bring about.

Then there's the small inconvenient fact that atheists have been proven absolutely wrong about the impact of religion on society, and about what secularization would bring about.

EDIT: I'd argue they were wrong about what religion did, but the people arguing in favor of religion are also wrong about what religion does. It might have done that in the past, and it might still do it if you are a goat herd in the Hindukush or a dirt farmer in the Indus valley, but not so for a western capitalist. I forgot to include this though so you get it as a weird edit instead lol.

Yes, but nowadays we've moved further along the Nietzschean path and there are new angles to attack religion from kinda percolating out there in gen z and gen alpha; mainly that people who claim to believe it don't actually believe it, because they don't act like they believe it.

Think about all these Johnny come lately statue profile pic dudes shopping which trad version of religion to choose; and realize that is how young people are going to experience popular religion; jut like we experienced religion like a kubrik film of incredibly venal mega churches and 9/11 and such.

We are in the Reaction phase right now; soon we will be in the counter-reaction phase.

but not so for a western capitalist

Huh? They're admittedly thinned out, but there still are religious communities in the west, and you can actually observe they're getting something out of it.

mainly that people who claim to believe it don't actually believe it, because they don't act like they believe it.

So? This applies to anyone as far as I can tell, even nihilists.

We are in the Reaction phase right now; soon we will be in the counter-reaction phase.

This is what I meant when I said it's going from undignified to perverse. As misguided as it was, I can understand "counter-reacting" to Alabama hicks teaching creationism in public schools because you think it will bring about a new age of peace, science, and freedom from dogma, but "counter-reacting" to dudes on Twitter trying to LARP themselves into finding some meaning in their life because something, something, muh Nietscheanism feels like a parody of itself.

More comments

They made a good point. Acknowledge it and carry on.

This kind of pseudointellectualizing diminishes your argument.

No, they didn't. Their "point" is infantile. "Why did they mention this guy's political views but not this other guy's religious views" is a terrible argument, because they are different categories. People generally do not condemn the religious views of others; the political views of others is much more fair game. Hence, it is hardly surprising that reviews did not mention Cruise's religious views.* It is no less inane than people claiming racial bias when police crack down on gang violence but not Wall Street fraud.

I would prefer that a filmmaker's views not be mentioned at all, but OP's "argument" is pathetic..

*Assuming that they didn't. But it seems that Rolling Stone -- the very magazine that OP complained of, published this article yesterday.

  • -10

My point is that there is nothing notable about the content of the movie to warrant controversy - it's all about how it was made and is watched by the wrong type of people. Skim through that linked Rolling Stone article - it's pretty obvious culture war. And understand that this isn't an isolated event; there are many more articles like that one, and most of the discussions of this movie on Reddit quickly devolve into claims of conservative histeria over supposedly non-existent child trafficking.

Rolling stone on another summer blockbuster:

Thrillingly and thoughtfully directed and written...the film lights up the screen with a full-throttle blast of action and fun. That’s to be expected. But what sneaks up and floors you is the film’s...profound, astonishing beauty.

From a summer blockbuster whose politics align with Rolling Stone's. Considerably more unrealistic (it's a comic book film).

Going off on a tangent here, but yet another live action remake of a Disney classic animated movie is going to be released next year (I think) and judging from prelimary photos, it's going to be - interesting.

They're making "Snow White" as a live action movie. Rachel Zegler will play Snow White and Gal Gadot will be the Wicked Stepmother Queen. All well and good, but the seven dwarves are - by the looks of it - not going to be dwarves. EDIT: and of course no Prince Charming, Snow White is a Strong Independent FairyTale Princess who don't need no man, she dreams of being a leader herself.

These photos were first claimed to be fake, and to be fair I couldn't believe anything so badly costumed was real, but then the revised commentary on that was "these are not official photos", they're using stand-ins and they're pick-up shots (whatever those may be).

Judge for yourselves as to how you would describe the Seven Companions 😁

Now, it could be that these are indeed fake photos to mislead people snooping around trying to get shots on-set, and I hope so. But one never knows, do one?

They're making "Snow White" as a live action movie. Rachel Zegler will play Snow White and Gal Gadot will be the Wicked Stepmother Queen. All well and good,

"Mirror mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?"

"Fairest? Not you, and surely not your stepdaughter. Cruella de Ville has a shot at it. Maybe Hannah. Fairest. Ha. You know I'm a normal mirror when you're not waking me up, you could see for yourself!"

deleted

they're going to interpret "fairest" as "most even-handed, just" and not "lightest-skinned."

Not sure if joking, but "fair" in the context of "somewhat archaic faery-tale English" just means "beautiful" -- I'm actually somewhat surprised that they haven't cast a black girl tbh.

Not sure if joking, but "fair" in the context of "somewhat archaic faery-tale English" just means "beautiful"

True. But in the tale Snow White was considered beautiful largely because of her fair skin (as contrasted with her red lips and black hair), which she was literally named for.

I doubt it--why should some corrupt wicked stepmother care about who's the fairest of them all in that case? Her motivation is that she wants to be fairest, and anyone with that motivation isn't exactly going to hunt down the people fairer than them.

Indeed. Though the movie need not make sense of course. The stepmother does indeed mean "fair" in the sense of "beautiful", but in Snow White specifically, beauty is tied into pale skin. It isn't just that; Snow White is white from birth but doesn't surpass the Queen until she is seven years old.

Oooh, that one makes sense, because one report had it that there wouldn't be any Prince Charming and that Snow White wanted to be a leader! So Justice Snow could indeed be the interpretation going on there!

There's "fairest" as in "lightest-skinned" and "fairest" as in "most beautiful". I think a lot of people think Gal Gadot is an attractive woman, so "aging queen whose vanity is what makes her insecure" works just as well there. The Snow White actress is half-Polish, half-Colombian, or quarter-Colombian at least, so again we're not talking totally South American Hispanic/Latina. Traditional Snow White has coal black hair anyway. So that one is "they don't understand the source material, and the folkloric tradition of 'black hair from the raven, white skin from the snow, red cheeks from the blood on the snow', but it's not as awful as it could have been" for me 🤷‍♀️

I'm more concerned about the awful looking costumes so far. Even the one for Snow White looks cheap and poorly-designed, something for an am-dram presentation rather than a multi-million dollar big studio adaptation.

(it's a comic book film).

Well exactly; it's not supposed to be realistic, so criticising on those grounds would be absurd. But if you're making a film at least partly based on real events that is being sold as an important story that needs to be told, the bar is obviously going to be considerably higher as far as realism goes.

Why not just come out and say that you are referring to Black Panther?

And, I have seen neither film, but surely you can see that lack of realism is usually a more serious flaw in a film that purports to be a true story than it is in a comic book film. You seem to be falling victim somewhat to confirmation bias.

lack of realism is usually a more serious flaw in a film that purports to be a true story

But it is also a convention that for "dramatic purposes" characters can be dropped, amalgamated, and even invented for the movie, even ones based on true stories. 'Lack of realism' has not been a criticism much seen before in such cases.

for movies that purport to be based on true stories, maybe lack of realism should be?

I'd agree that lack of realism should be a criticism for 'based on a true story' but the accepted interpretation seems to be that for dramatic purposes, sometimes you can/have to do a bit of inventing.

In which case, if you were perfectly fine with "the last true-story movie totally made up the character of Benji Bestboi and in fact the ending in reality was not that they won a gazillion dollars and shut down the evil Rice Krispie manufacturing plant, but they had to cease their protests since they were being nuisances and the Rice Krispie plant was sold for a gazillion dollars so the Wicked Owners made a fortune", then you don't get to suddenly be all "in scene 94 of this movie, the calendar shows 1st July 73 when in actual fact that particular visit to the bar happened on 30th June 73" about this.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats