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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   28050 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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Since no one has posted yet, I figured that instead of culture war ephemera, we can indulge in a bit of a discussion on first principles.

The axioms of the liberal west (namely, private property and individual rights) have the emergent property of inequality, for the following reasons.

A) Man is possessed of inalienable rights (let's assume that Locke is correct.) of life, liberty, and private property.

B) He has the right to improve what nature provides (so as long as he does not impunge on the commons.) Therefore.

C) He has the freedom to enjoy the benefits of his good decisions, and endure his bad ones.

But...

A) Men are not born with equal talent and ability. Therefore

B) The choices they make with their capital are not equally wise. Over time...

C) Men are not born into equal prosperity and circumstance, compounding with the effects of A.

This statement seems trivially true. Everyone knows someone in their lives who makes smart decisions with their money and someone who makes dumb decisions with them. But the very notion that this over time will lead to a hierarchal and oligarchic character of their society is viscerally offensive to many. The reaction to this dilemma is the underlying problem of all modern political ideologies.

The communists see it as a bad thing. (Obviously.) They want a non-hierarchal society with no capitalists. But in this endeavor they have historically failed, creating new hierarchies and new party oligarchs with control over state industries. And it is not clear that collective bodies are better or wiser at allocating capital: real-world performance says no.

The fascists see it as a good thing. In this, they are at least consistent with their own ideology. But in terms of performance, it has also been a non-winner, inflicting great amounts of human misery on the species before collapsing under the strain of expansionist wars. Fully metabolizing the inequality of man doesn't seem to lead to good results either.

A canny reader may go, 'ah, but you haven't mentioned liberalism! are you an enlightened centrist?' I'm sorry to say, but no. Liberalism is strategically ambiguous: or, in other words, it pretends that the problem doesn't exist. By patching up the most obvious inequalities with welfare programs and other forms of redistributionism, the proponents of liberalism can carry on with the pretense of equality married to a free market system. But because they are ideologically restricted by private property and individual rights, they can only work on the margins, and never truly solve the problem of equality.

Perhaps if we lived in the boundaries of ethnic nation-states, it wouldn't be a problem, but we live in the age of bourgeoise republics, bohemian in character. What that means is that political equality is converging on economic equality, and vis versa. Beside the obvious assabiyah problems this creates, it also perpetuates the seed of fascism and communism by perpetuating the critique of the liberal society. The hypocrisy and self-contradiction creates a constant fear of revolution in its ruling classes, which only increases the hypocrisy until the liberals are too weak and enervated to present a proper opposition to their illiberal enemies.

Rather than blaming the evilness on illusory phantoms as certain explanatory narratives do (CRT, globalists, da joos) it seems clear that the notion of natural rights itself is the cause of it all. Nature is many things, but it is not equal. What is the solution, then? Do we change the natural condition of man and refine our species successor, or do we return to obedience to supernatural emanations of God?

I don't know. I like natural rights. I like having them. But I can't justify keeping them.

I don't really see the contradiction. Nothing about ex-post or even ex-ante equality is baked into liberalism's concept of natural right. We basically just want institutions to not interfere too much and to treat everybody the same when they do. And if there's a really huge liberal commitment to ex-ante equality (e.g., everyone is born into the same amount of wealth) then taxes and transfers can get us there.

I disagree!

Although the Declaration of Independence is not a document with any legal force nowadays, I deem it a good marker of what the best Enlightenment thinking of the time was going for. They really did believe that God made man equal. But God has evaporated from the public commons, and we're left with the equality.

I have met many liberals who say that if we only committed more national resources to welfarism, we'd emerge in the promised land. Are you of the personal belief that reparations on the scale of what is suggested in California necessary? Is that the 'huge effort' you refer to? If not, then how much money exactly should go into patching up the liberal project, into perpetuity?

They really did believe that God made man equal.

I'm fairly sure they did not mean "equal in ability".

You and Teddy Roosevelt, in his famous "Man in the Arena" speech (although that might have been the part where he was quoting ol' Honest Abe).

They really did believe that God made man equal

All of my mainstream American education growing up never conceived of equality in the way you’re suggesting. It was always in the sense of “equally subject to and deserving of the protections of the rule of law” or something along those lines. Maybe they actually meant something else but I’m pretty faithfully representing how American Liberalism is explained in mainstream American primary education.

Are you of the personal belief that reparations on the scale of what is suggested in California necessary?

No, because I am not committed to the notion of equality you are putting forward. And my views are pretty representative of American liberals (not progressives, who are the ones pushing for reparations). However if, counterfactually, liberals were more committed to the kind of equality you’re describing, then sure, it seems like big enough reparations would definitionally be big enough lol

By this argument, the chief downside of fascism is bounded in the age of MAD.

And what alternative do you see? The children of the Scottish enlightenment seem to have done far better than those children who kept to Rome.

Cleave to the, actual capital C, Calvinism that the Scottish enlightenment was born from? Reject it as the French enlightenment did? Cleave instead to Rome, with all its flaws coming to bear?

Some weaker tradition of Paganism like the reactionaries profess?

I honestly don't know. I admit that although I am anti-liberal, I am aware that being able to critique a system by no means gives you the expertise or authority to suggest a replacement. It may be indeed that liberalism is the best performant system human beings have come up so far while simultaneously incubating authoritarianism within its ideological framework because of its contradictions. If there's a formulation of liberalism that can square the circle, I would like to learn of it, because I like having liberal rights in general.

Collapse seems the natural outcome. And then a return to decentralized experiments in government.

Very few people actually have a problem with talented people earning lots of money and then spending their own money on personal consumption, even if this is "unequal" compared to untalented people who have less money. Nonzero, but very few. Most people complaining about rich people are actually upset at some combination of

1: Rentseeking. Big company gets a stranglehold on some sort of niche or patent, ousts/regulates/threatens out their competition, and earns tons of money disproportionate to their actual economic contribution. CEO/executives/shareholders get rich on economic surplus that they didn't rightfully earn.

2: Inherited wealth. If John is talented and earns a ton of money, as his private property he can do whatever he wants with it. One of the things people like to do with their money is give it to their children, especially when they die and can't use it any more. So John gives his earned wealth to his son Jim, who is a spoiled talentless loser, and gets all of the benefits of massive wealth with none of the personal contribution to society or perceived merit. Everyone hates Jim.

3: Interest. Capital is incredibly valuable to the economy. Therefore people who invest their money in capital can earn lots of money from their money. Therefore their wealth grows exponentially even without them having talent or contributing labor. Talentless losers like Jim can invest the wealth they inherited and continue to become increasingly wealthy without actually having any talent whatsoever. They're still contributing to the economy in the sense that the wealth they invest is useful, but they themselves have done nothing to earn it other than inheriting the legacy of their parents who did earn it (or stole it via rentseeking, or literal theft in the distant past)

These are all really hard problems to solve. I'm not entirely convinced that 2 and 3 are actually problems in their own right rather than just discomforting rights people have. Like, someone has the right to masturbate while smearing poop on their chest, but I find it disgusting and would rather wish they didn't even though technically I would agree they are free to do that in the privacy of their own home and I won't argue that the government should make it illegal. It's still disgusting to my sensibilities.

In my opinion, 1 is a genuine problem that definitely needs to be solved. 2 is probably fine if we can address 3, and 3 is only solvable by economic stagnation or post-scarcity. Basically, as long as the economy is growing, and capital investment is an important component of that growth, then the people driving the growth via investment will capture the growth. If the economy stops growing, or labor becomes a more important part of growth rather than capital, then capital is no longer so ridiculously valuable and interest rates will plummet. Until then, I think we're stuck with Jims getting richer.

Very few people actually have a problem with talented people earning lots of money and then spending their own money on personal consumption, even if this is "unequal" compared to untalented people who have less money.

If I had a dollar for every time these types have complained about tech millionaires, I'd be a tech billionaire. They absolutely do have a problem with talented people earning lots of money and then spending it on their own personal consumption. As you can see by their complaining about Bezos and Zuckerberg and Musk.

Their complaints about inherited wealth amount to a motte-and-bailey, where the motte contains the Walmart heirs and the bailey extends out to anyone whose parents were wealthy enough that they grew up in a better place than East Baltimore. Somewhere in the middle they use this as an excuse to bash Musk, for instance, claiming he's only rich because his father owned a share in an emerald mine.

Rent seeking is a real issue, but they tend to apply that to things which aren't rent-seeking either, like taking advantage of existing tax deductions and government incentives.

Rent seeking is a real issue, but they tend to apply that to things which aren't rent-seeking either, like taking advantage of existing tax deductions and government incentives.

Many people seem to think that "rent-seeking" refers to any business that collects rent from tenants. I suppose this is a product of the linguistic similarity, but it has the unfortunate effect of giving people a belief that disliking their landlord is motivated by some serious political principle.

If I had a dollar for every time these types have complained about tech millionaires, I'd be a tech billionaire. They absolutely do have a problem with talented people earning lots of money and then spending it on their own personal consumption. As you can see by their complaining about Bezos and Zuckerberg and Musk.

They dislike those people because they're perceived (in Zuckerberg's case because of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in Musk's case because of his culture war views, and in Bezos' case because of alleged mistreatment of warehouse workers) as culture war enemies for the mainstream left.

They don't (outside of a tiny minority of actual anti-capitalists) have a problem with Beyoncé or Michael Jordan or George Clooney or Tom Hanks or the Obamas being extremely rich. They didn't have a problem with Rowling being very rich until she became a TERF.

In Bezos case it is about his wealth being locked in amazon stock and general fiduciary duty towards stockholders. So he both has interests aligned with stockholders and is obligated to take their best interests at heart. Unfortunately this means that labor gets the shaft. Paying the labor (especially the easily replaceable, low leverage, low wage, living paycheck to paycheck labor) the minimum and working them to the max.

That is why usually it is the state's job to put a floor on how low can you push that kind of labor.

CEOs, executives and "the rich" in general get a lot of hate. I think the default position is that people with a lot of money are bad but they get a pass if they're part of the in-group. Kind of like the fact that they support Bill Clinton doesn't mean they're ok with powerful men banging their interns as a general principle.

Very few people actually have a problem with talented people earning lots of money and then spending their own money on personal consumption, even if this is "unequal" compared to untalented people who have less money.

This doesn't feel quite right to me. The Musks and Bezoses of the world get a lot of hate. The more civilized inheritors of wealth get a pass,.

People are much more likely to accept generational wealth then they are to accept that some people are just literally better than them. And, in fact, you see a lot of cope. People bend over backwards to claim that Bill Gates or Elon Musk got where they did because of their semi-rich fathers. Anything to deny the reality that some who excel do so because of superior ability, or that others fail because of their own lack.

Something tells me the idle rich don't get a pass, per se, though they are definitely far less scrutinized than "active" billionaires.

I see that as lining up with my claims rather than contradicting them. Most people think that talent-earned wealth is okay, but generational wealth is unearned, and therefore consider only the latter to be an insult and grounds for an attack. The vocal minority who hate all rich people are forced to frame their arguments in terms of unearned wealth because claims that "Musk is talented and therefore capable of generating tons of money and this is unfair so he should share the fruits of his labor with us less talented people" fall on deaf ears.

I think this is a matter of degree, and also that while talent is important, luck is also.

So I think most would be okay with Musk / Gates / Bezos having 100x the median wealth, maybe even 1000x, there is a problem with them having 100000x the median wealth. They may be talented, but they aren't that talented.

I may just be projecting -- I'm generally a big fan of capitalism, but I think the differences between the 0.01% and the 70% in the US are just too big -- and it's hurting overall society. I'm generally for fairly mild adjustments to redistribution (small bumps to, e.g., income tax, inheritance tax, maybe capital gains) to reduce the skew at the extreme edges.

The thing is, Musk/Gates/Bezos/etc. don't actually "have" 100000x the median wealth. Their "wealth" is simplistically calculated from the stocks they own in their companies. But they couldn't just cash out those stocks and dive into their wealth like Scrooge McDuck. First of all, they would have to find buyers. There's no one alive who would buy $200b in one stock, which means you'd need multiple buyers. But there also aren't $200b worth of multiple buyers waiting around for any one of these stocks at their current price.

Which brings us to the second problem: they'd have to substantially lower the amount they're willing to sell their stocks for, in order to find enough buyers. First, this would substantially lower their net worth (which, recall, is crudely calculated by stock value times quantity of stocks). More importantly, if they were to attempt to sell all their stocks in this way, the market would immediately assume they know something dire about their companies' prospects and the value of the stock would plummet.

So, the mega wealthy like Musk/Gates/Bezos have their wealth locked into their companies and can't unlock it to any substantial degree - they're going down with the ship if they try.

That's not to say they aren't very wealthy - they are. They can leverage their tremendous stock assets to essentially get huge loans to fund a lavish lifestyle ("Hey, loaner, I have a gazillion dollars in stock. Wanna lend me a tiny percentage of that in cash? I'm a low-risk borrower because, if I default, well, here's all this collateral!"). But it's not, like, a hundred billion lavish.

assabiyah

God it's been so long I had to look up the definition of that word again. How time flies...

Wang Huning, the court philosopher of the CCP, diagnosed the fundamental American contradiction in "America against America":

Americans believe they are free and equal, but free men will not be equal, and equal men are not free.

This caused less problems in the past, when America had a shared culture - the draft, Christianity, nuclear families, the three TV channels, etc. We could be equal because we were only pretending to be free, and so much of life was actually constrained.

Today, everyone gets to choose their life path, and divergent paths yield divergent results. There are those (broadly on the left) who would sacrifice freedom for equality, and those (broadly on the right) who would sacrifice equality for freedom. Most of the culture war comes from people not realizing that you can't have both. The left thinks the right hates equality, the right thinks the left hates freedom.

I'm not quite so inclined to let my enemies redefine my values for me. When I say that Americans should be free and equal, I do not mean to say that we need some Harrison Bergeron weights to make sure that no one can run too fast, but to say that we should all receive equal treatment before the law and be treated with some measure of égalité by our peers. I expect that the result of this will be rather unequal outcomes, I am not surprised or affronted by that outcome and I do not see any conflict of values in striving for equal justice while having unequal abilities, desires, and luck.

When I say that Americans should be free and equal, I do not mean to say that we need some Harrison Bergeron weights to make sure that no one can run too fast

But crucially, and assuming you're a Liberal, you have no possible convincing argument to someone who would propose such a thing , or going in the direction of such a thing.

We all saw what happened to Affirmative Action and other various spoils policy the US has seen fit to implement. Equality of opportunity has always and will always just be a canard. So long as we don't live in a totalitarian state where children are taken from their parents, educated the same and cloned with the same genetics, no such thing is possible, and therefore any push in that direction (such as taxing inheritance harshly or enacting redistributive policies) cannot be successfully opposed by Liberals in principle.

Rawls always comes in to use the underlying philosophy to justify unsustainable expansions beyond political liberalism.

I expect that the result of this will be rather unequal outcomes, I am not surprised or affronted by that outcome and I do not see any conflict of values in striving for equal justice while having unequal abilities, desires, and luck.

Problem is, it's too tough a bullet to bite that people who make bad choices get bad outcomes. There's always going to be a drumbeat to save them from their choices, both from the right (ban those choices) and from the left (take from the people who made better choices to help those who made bad ones). The first goes against freedom, the second for equality, and the argument that the wealthy can afford to support the self-destructive in their freedom without limit will never sound as mean as biting that bullet.

I like the idea of liberalism as a utilitarian balance between the competing concerns of “men have a right to reap the fruit of their labor” and ”no one should hoard and abuse resources which are not integral to their pursuit of happiness”. I don’t see the philosophy of natural rights as having any direct influence on people’s political beliefs today; it hardly ever comes up. Instead, in terms of the capitalism vs redistribution debate, I see two camps separated by two intuitions regarding justice. One is that people deserve the resources which they fairly obtain, one is that people do not deserve to hoard 100x the resources of their employees. The idea that there is a universal principle that someone necessarily deserves their income if they make it is nonsensical superstition, it’s magical thinking, a dogma of mammon. Someone can argue that this is the best dogma to establish social stability, but it can’t be a self-evident fact.

I think the most realistic points of disagreement in mainstream America are that conservatives fear redistribution will go to the wrong people (demotivating and harming the status of the middle class), and liberals fear that the wealthy waste resources frivolously that could go to the greater social good. At root, I think these are utilitarian intuitions.

The conservative impulse is that welfare creates a poorly-behaved underclass governed by bad incentives that compound over generations. They are in large part correct. The progessive impulse is that capitalism creates a class of elites that will inevitably interfere in the democratic process both to preserve their wealth and status and to further their own politics (regardless of whether these are shared by the majority of people). They are also in large part correct.

The question is whether both problems are actually worse than the alternatives. Modern developed countries are now so materially prosperous that allowing poor people to starve, or freeze, or die of easily treated illness really does seem inhumane (in the sense that it is an easily preventable tragedy, and that preventing it does not cripplingly burden wider society). And as for the effects of great wealth inequality, hierarchy is a natural part of all human civilization, as you note, and elites will always use their influence to serve themselves and their ideas, so it's hard to see how this too is preventable without attempting damaging forms of economic leveling.

Welfare is one iota of a large group of policies, some of which are prosocial and some of which are antisocial. If we want a “well-behaved lower class”, we would be making shift work illegal and enforcing rules on maternity leave and company-provided healthy meals. And banning children from accessing certain media. This would be a great boon to mental and physical health. Alas, we don’t do this, and so the middle class pays a disproportionate amount of their income on the consequences of our antisocial society, via healthcare and police services and jails. So in addition to welfare and unemployment checks, we also have other policies: unions, capping C-Suite pay at a percent of employee pay, domestic protection from foreign immigrant workers… there’s a lot.

the progressive impulse is that capitalism creates a class of elites that will inevitably interfere in the democratic process both to preserve their wealth and status and to further their own politics

I don’t think this is the root of the progressive impulse. The root is that they feel their quality of life is not proportional to what they deserve, given the vast mass of wealth that is wasted by the 1%. Interference in democracy and self-serving tendencies are secondary concerns. Progressives see the social policies of other countries and find them desirable, and they can also imagine better conditions in the US.

Modern developed countries are now so materially prosperous that allowing poor people to starve, or freeze, or die of easily treated illness really does seem inhumane

If we disperse more of the funds that the mega-wealthy waste, and lobby for better employee conditions, then people will be healthier and live longer. So progressives are merely asserting that there is a superior possibility for America, instead of the steadily decreasing health and purchasing power and increasing debt the middle class. I think that the way they go about this is wrong but that’s the impulse.

I attribute the absence of natural rights from the discussion as the appalling dearth of political education in the modern demos rather than its irrelevancy. Ask the average voter where their rights come from and you'll get unhelpful answers (God? the State? being a 'decent' human being?). The degradation of rights into entitlements given by governmental fiat is something to be fought against.

Although it may be irrelevant in people's day to day lives it is of the greatest importance to the philosophy of government, and therefore its character.

  • But in terms of performance, it has also been a non-winner,

It took half the planet to stop two fascist countries. Had the US had the land Germany had and the Germans had had the British empire, US, Canada, Australia, France etc the war would have lasted a week.

inflicting great amounts of human misery on the species before collapsing under the strain of expansionist wars

It was the least expansionist of the ideologies. While liberal states continue on a rampage of expansionism across the middle east, latin America and eastern Europe fascist states were more non interventionist. Their focus was on building the homeland rather than trying to expand into Nepal.

Liberalism is a way for the elite to claim that they have no responsibility or noblesse oblige. They are just people and world citizens who happen to be richer. Liberalism was the merchant class wanting the privilege of the nobility without having the responsibility or the discipline of it. The current elite want to live like kings, yet they don't want to live like knights. The way forward is to replace natural rights (defined by who? enforced by who?) with natural order. Some people naturally fill certain rolls. Humans are a tribal species.

Liberalism's has an equivalent to communism's labour value of theory, aka the false axiom. For liberalism, it is the idea that humans randomly spawn on Earth. We didn't live in the garden of Eve and then decide to create society, we lived in tribes long before our species existed. There is no social contract, there are no free independent individuals and existing in a social structure isn't oppressive. A human in a social hierarchy isn't more oppressed than a zebra in a herd on the Savannah. The oppressed zebra is the lonely one.

I like natural rights. I like having them. But I can't justify keeping them.

I see no need to jettison natural rights. Even as Liberalism is now a dead ideology. Natural law existed before Liberalism and it will exist after Liberalism.

The one thing that such contradictions require is the rejection of equality as a first principle, and universal democracy as a consequence. Both of which have always been dubious propositions anyway.

I tend to be much more enamored with the idea of interlocking relationships with duties for each person as a better model. If I want more power and more freedoms, I must find a way to climb the dominance hierarchy. I must do so by doing things other people find useful in some way, and I’d have some responsibility to those beneath me. And on the other hand, if I simply wish to do as little as possible, that’s fine, but I would have to give up privileges to do that, and one of those is that I’d have to obey those above me.

Honestly, social structures like this show up everywhere, or at least often enough, that I suspect this is simply how natural human society works. You obey those above you and protect and teach those below you, and for the most part you end up with a fairly stable and functional society. And I don’t see this being completely incompatible with the concept of those natural rights that simply constrain the government from interfering in them.

Hierarchy doesn't actually work that way. As you move higher you get more power and less accountability, whereas if you are at the bottom you're worked like a slave (often literally) and accountable for every moment of your time.

Taps Sign

If responsibilities/consequences for failure don't scale proportional to one's authority and power, asymmetries will come to threaten the whole system.

The system can remain asymmetric for longer than you remain viable.

Challenge accepted.

And it's less about me and more about designing systems (subsystems, if you like) that are robust and are likely to survive the supersystem's collapse and possibly supplant it. Whether I'm there to see it or not.

I think this requires noblesse oblige from the people higher up, which mostly only happens if there is accountability for people at the top via skin in the game. If you are a feudal lord with lands that your famils has held for generations and peasants under you whose families have worked for your for generations, you are incentivized to take care of them because their thriving is your thriving. If you mistreat them too terribly they will rebel and chop your head off. If you mismanage the lands you will go bankrupt and be reduced to poverty. If you do a good job you will be wealthy and loved.

If you are the patriarch of a family and you mistreat your wife and/or children they will hate you and leave.

If you are a modern high level bureaucrat or government official in charge of millions/billions of dollars of someone else's money and mismanagement is rewarded with a transfer or a golden parachute, there's none of this. There's no incentive to behave responsibly to those below you, and there's no incentive for people trying to climb their way up to do so gracefully when a momentary clawhold can be cemented with the powers obtained along the way.

If SBF, or the bankers who caused the housing crisis, or the politicians who ruined the economy during Covid faced the ruin of their families into longterm poverty, or beheading by angry mobs, those issues probably wouldn't have happened in the first place because they would have been more careful. If every politician who voted for war was required to lead on the front lines, we'd have a lot fewer wars. But because many (most?) hierarchies allow people high to foist the consequences of their decisions onto people lower down, we typically don't get the nice scale of risk/reward that you envision here, though it sometimes does work like that.

If the plebes want noblesse oblige they better start showing some obeiscence. The UMC class is already funding your continued existence, start showing some gratitude instead of "Eat the rich" (sidenote: it's much more efficient to eat the poor instead, but that's a digestion digression for a different day) and then we can talk.

It's a prisoner's dilemma. Both sides are currently caught in a defect-defect equilibrium, in which case it's in the interest of neither side to unilaterally start cooperating. In cases where there is sustained contact between the same individuals, ie a repeated prisoner's dilemma, there is some hope. But in cases where everyone just hops from job to job, town to town, country to country, there's little reward for an individual who sacrifices their own interests for the sake of an employer/employee only to be shown no gratitude because their next interaction will be with a completely different individual of that class who is used to defect-defect.

The UMC class is already funding your continued existence,

Is it? What real work are they doing to keep people fed, clothed and sheltered? I don't see them working on farms or getting involved in the actual distribution of tangible and meaningful resources. In actuality they're simply skimming off the top, and providing anti-services in the form of hostile doctrines and policies which make life worse for the people underneath them. The people in charge of Goldman Sachs while it looted and torched the societal commons deserve a guillotine more than they do any kind of respect, and I don't think they'd like what would happen if they tried to force the issue on the rest of the populace.

Is it? What real work are they doing to keep people fed, clothed and sheltered?

Just because the UMC class don't physically partake in creating food, clothes and shelter doesn't mean they aren't integral to it's production at the levels we have today. Norman Borlaug's invention of more hardy wheat strains etc. led to a massive increase in the capacity of the world to reliably feed itself, he has done far more for the world's net food production than any random two bit farmer in a tractor (which I must add was envisaged, designed and continues to be iteratively improved on by UMC level engineers).

The people in charge of Goldman Sachs while it looted and torched the societal commons deserve a guillotine more than they do any kind of respect, and I don't think they'd like what would happen if they tried to force the issue on the rest of the populace.

I work in finance (though not in IB) I assure you your food in the shop where you buy it from would be 20+% more expensive if investment bankers who broker deals in the background didn't exist, as well as your life being generally shittier, no different to it being shittier if you had to live with the computing power we had in the 1990s, which is yet another thing the PMC provides (technological progress).

But all this is moot, I was talking about their net tax contributions that end up getting spent by the lower classes. It doesn't matter one whit whether the UMC produces a single grain of wheat, a single strand of silk or a single beam of lumber if they can trade their money (which they by and large got because someone was willing to give it to them for something in exchange) for it. On a countrywide level that's no different to producing the item indigenously, the end result in both cases is you got yourself some grain, cloth or shelter that wasn't present before in your borders, and they can do this trade easily with a farmer in Ukraine or a grower in China. The terminal problem is not with the worldwide lower classes who by and large know their place, it's with the western lower classes who think that being born on a specific piece of rock grants them privileges denied to other humans with a greater capacity to contribute to the world whose only crime is being born somewhere without a sizable highly earning UMC they can extort money from.

Oh, my apologies! I thought you'd just made a typo while referring to the PMC. I'm actually legitimately unsure what you are referring to when you say UMC class - Upper middle class class? I wasn't thinking of people like Norman Borlaug, but people like Robin DiAngelo, Sheryl Sandberg or Ibram Kendi who largely produce nothing but toxic culture war effluvia. I have some more substantive things I want to say in response to your other points, but I'd rather clear this up first because I'm not sure I ultimately disagree with you.

Oh I absolutely agree people like Kendi are a net negative. I was meaning UMC to refer to roughly people in the top 4-5% of the income distribution. Yeah I agree I was basically using UMC and PMC interchangeably here, should have been more precise. This group probably does include some unsavory characters like Kendi, especially those who can set themselves up a good grift to extract resources from their followers but I would say the lower classes who net consume government spending have an even higher proportion of unsavory characters relative to those who do productive work like making food or clothes.

If truck drivers stop working it's all over by the end of the week. If soldiers refuse to join/fight in the US military, then the Pentagon and State Department are irrelevant nobodies. If port workers down tools, good luck importing food. That's where your trade argument breaks down. Without these people, there is no trade, no transport, no nothing.

Consider 'essential workers' in COVID. Now there are some PMCs that were essential - judges for instance. But the vast vast majority are working class or poorly paid. And even judges are not nearly as essential as truck drivers. You can have a long backlog of cases but a backlog of food supply is called a famine. This will change with automation but I'm just concerned with the present.

it's with the western lower classes who think that being born on a specific piece of rock grants them privileges denied to other humans with a greater capacity to contribute to the world

They're not merely privileged, they have the power to vaporize the whole system instantly, even though they're not organized or motivated to wield that power. The top of a pyramid can't exist without a sturdy foundation.

If truck drivers stop working it's all over by the end of the week.

If this happens we import new people over from the third world who're going to do this cheaper and won't stop working because they know what is good for them and know the meaning of being thankful. Trade doesn't just apply to goods, it also applies to humans. Your statement is no different from saying water should be the most valuable thing in the world because without it we die in 3 days. I'm going to make a top level on this soon where I delve deeper.

You assume those third worlders already have trucks, know road rules, know standards for cargo loading and unloading, know how to read a GPS... Last but not least do you want to spend your time in a retirement home being looked after by some Haitian migrant who wants to do the absolute minimum to get paid and couldn't care less about your welfare because you're totally foreign to her? The quality of work is not identical.

know the meaning of being thankful

We are the ones who should be thankful for the food, goods and security that they provide. Society works smoothly when classes work together, not when they are divided. The elite can replace workers by mass immigration. The workers can also replace the elite by massacre. What you're advocating is top-tier fragilista stuff, reneging on the social contract, the equivalent of proposing to replace the citizen-soldiers with foreign mercenaries. Do you not see any flaws in this proposal? What if we suddenly need the whole population to do important war work - and you just spent decades demeaning, undermining and threatening to replace them? What if we need the consent of the masses to govern? What if we don't want electric substations being blown up, cities paralyzed by riots... Majorities can oppress minorities but it's very hard for a minority to oppress a majority.

water should be the most valuable thing in the world

It is the most important thing in the world, perhaps behind oxygen. The supply is very high though, reducing its value. But that doesn't mean we can scorn the suppliers!

Too much boo-outgroup. Too close to waging the culture war rather than discussing it.

You've had 9 Mod actions against you, and have been a consistently bad poster. I'm not sure there is any point in trying to "reform" your posting habits at this point. I'm gonna start with a perma ban, but if some quality posters or mods want to speak up on your behalf then I'm open to just making this a temp ban.

Edit: bolido_sentimental Spoke up in favor, changing to a twenty day ban.

I would advocate for a temp ban here. I agree that he goes too far sometimes, but BC often posts well-considered or interesting/unusual takes. In general, I feel like the benefits from his posts outweigh the demerits of his occasional blow-up.

This is just my opinion.

Done, I've changed the ban length.

I do not like the poster you banned, in fact I have him blocked. But from my logged-out browsing, his values are less inimical to the existence of themotte than many posters with cleaner records. Perhaps he is sometimes too blunt in expressing his views, but they are unique and according to Toltecs vs Olmecs doctrine deserve special protection.

I also realize that my reputation isn't strong enough for my words to count.

I also realize that my reputation isn't strong enough for my words to count.

I guess I didn't make that part clear. I didn't want other troublemakers speaking up. But someone like you that has ~300 comments and no mod notes is someone with a good reputation in my mind. Having quality contributions is great, but not at all required for a good reputation. Contributing and not getting much mod attention is enough to make someone a net-positive in my book.

I also wasn't going to give my opinion on this ban because I don't consider myself a high-quality contributor. But if no mod notes is indeed the bar, I'll chime in (I have 842 comments here and on the subreddit with no warnings/bans and, to my knowledge, no mod notes).

I'm in favor of the ban and think way more banning should be done in general. I think way too many people treat warnings and bans like it's a fee they get to pay in exchange for getting to be rude to someone they disagree with. They know exactly what they're doing - they know it's against the rules when they submit their comment. They just don't care. They think the other guy deserves it, so they'll pay the ban tax and take a day off.

I think most of these people would bite their tongue if there were real, significant consequences.

I'm in favor of the ban and think way more banning should be done in general. I think way too many people treat warnings and bans like it's a fee they get to pay in exchange for getting to be rude to someone they disagree with. They know exactly what they're doing - they know it's against the rules when they submit their comment. They just don't care. They think the other guy deserves it, so they'll pay the ban tax and take a day off.

This is pretty close to my views on the subject. Out of all the active moderators I think I am usually the one that is most in favor of more bans, longer bans, and fewer warnings.

There are some people that try to follow the rules, if they get a warning they will correct and be more careful in the future. We have plenty of accounts with just one or two warnings, and then otherwise great behavior.

There are others that seem closer to what you describe, they will happily pay the ban tax (or evade it altogether through alts), and then come back and make trouble again. For all I know I might've been banning the same 5-10 people for my last decade of moderation.

When I see accounts with nine mod notes about bad behavior I feel like I know which category they fall into.

I think most of these people would bite their tongue if there were real, significant consequences.

This part I disagree with, from experience what happens is those people become crusaders for "the mods are terrible/evil oppressors". They just turn most of their rudeness on us, and put us in the position of having to ban people for attacking the moderators. Making us look like petty dictators.

Speaking of consequences, I am curious if the people against a ban would be willing to suffer any consequences for the behavior of BurdensomeCount. @TheDag @some @bolido_sentimental

Treat this fully as a hypothetical, but what if the next time BurdensomeCount got banned, you also received a one day ban? Would it still be worth it to keep them around?

I ask, because for the moderators there are consequences to keeping around troublesome users. This interaction takes up my time and energy. And for every mod action on a user, there are usually about 5 posts from that same user that were on the edge and we let slide. When I go through the mod queue I usually try and carefully read posts and their context. This is all work I've volunteered for, but I also don't have unlimited time in my day.

More comments

I will also come down asking for a temp ban - Count often toes the line but I think he adds a quite unique perspective here. I would hate to see him perma-banned.

True, but the thing is that feudalism has been tried in lots of different civilizations and has proven pretty stable overall. And I don’t see how such accountability is hard to conjure up.

I don't know if SBF is the best example to use considering he is likely going to spend a considerable amount of time in prison and will almost certainly not be allowed to work in any banking/stock market capacity or otherwise manage anyone's money but his own when released. I don't see his job prospects being too great other than as a speaker at banking ethics seminars where he tells everybody about how he was a billionaire who lost everything due to his own poor decisions. Some day I'll do a full writeup on the mortgage crisis and what caused it, but for now suffice it to say that it wasn't the kind of thing that could have been prevented by more personal accountability, unless you want to go so far as to make any financial innovation so risky that we're still operating on a barter system.

Tanking your own career and losing money that you yourself earned (or had "earned" via fraud) is not the same as bankrupting your entire family estate which had been passed down for generations and shared with your family. If SBF was managing the funds of a few dozen siblings/cousins/aunts/uncles/nieces/nephews instead of random strangers, he simultaneously would have been more careful and would have had more oversight from them.

As for the mortgage crisis, my understanding of it was that bad mortgages were packaged up and misleadingy labeled and sold as if they were better than they actually were. Which means when they failed the people who created the bad mortgages in the first place were not the ones who suffered for it, which is another form of lack of skin in the game. If mortgages could not be resold, the people who made them would have lost their own money, or more likely would have recognized the danger to themselves and not made bad mortgages in the first place. I'm not saying "make it illegal to resell mortgages" is actually a good solution, there are an awful lot of benefits to modern economies that maybe make up for the costs of losing skin in the game in many places, but it is a huge cost and an awful lot of the problems we see in the modern economy are those costs.

I'm going to say that the United States as originally instantiated had an elegant theoretical solution to most of the issues facing liberalism.

There was a document which prescribed those few natural/inalienable/fundamental rights that everyone was assumed to have 'from birth.' This document also provided for the creation of a unified entity which would assist in ensuring the 'commons' was preserved and ameliorating disputes between the states without violence.

This setup was based on the 'state' as the basic unit of political authority. The 'states' which ultimately all threw their influence together to form a supervisory entity are kind of arbitrarily defined in terms of population, size of territory, and the actual rights granted to those they exercised control over (the big one being whether slavery was abolished or not), but at least they could say they were the generally accepted sovereign that the people in their governed territory had more-or-less consented to.

So the aforementioned document laying out the basic inalienable rights everyone was entitled to invoke which helped define the baseline expectations for each citizen so they wouldn't accidentally cross a given state border and find all their property confiscated without warning and themselves thrown into jail without getting due process.

Outside of that, each state was given substantial leeway in how it conducted affairs, raised money, punished crimes, and facilitated the so-called 'common good.' You could call it 'laboratories of Democracy' but I think it just made sense to allow people to sort themselves according to their own preferences and people who found themselves governed by a body that was hostile to their interests could uproot to somewhere more favorable rather than having to attempt a coup, bloodless or otherwise, of their state's governing body.

Federalism made it difficult (and continues to make it difficult, to be fair) for any wannabe fascists or communists to bring the entire country under their thumb because the necessary authority to rule everything was dispersed and decentralized such that you couldn't just win one election and then seize control, sweeping your enemies away in one fell swoop.

Of course, Lysander Spooner took the theoretical foundation of Constitutional Law to task shortly after the Civil War.

There was no point, admittedly, where the whole U.S. was operating as a harmonious whole sans internal strife and pockets of violence. Still, the structure proved resilient.

What really makes the Federalist project crumble was the elision of 'civil rights' with 'natural rights' and the elevation of the former to higher status than the latter.

In my utopia, I can imagine a Federal Government that maintains an army and navy solely for the defense of the actual borders of the United States, and has a stable cadre of agents tasked with intervening in disputes between states and directly protecting the enumerated rights of citizens when infringed. The states have control of economic affairs in their borders and can establish legal regimes that pursue goals other than the pure protection of natural rights, so long as those basic enumerated rights took precedence when invoked, and citizens were ensured the basic 'freedom' to uproot and move as needed.

But as soon as the world of rights which are to be protected gets away from the basic "Life, Liberty, Property" core concept and starts invoking protection of 'equality' or vaguely defined 'justice' or, worse, the right to 'FEEL safe,' the mandate can grow almost unfettered.

To be clear, what I'm saying is that in my utopia if an individual state decided to, e.g. engage in widespread wealth redistribution, or slavery reparations, or wanted to provide 'free' healthcare to all citizens then this would be fine! Or if it wanted to become a draconian police state when it comes to enforcing 'law and order,' that would also be permissible. Hell, if they decided to grant full personhood rights to Corporations and turn over control of most governmental functions to private entities controlled by international mega-corporations, that could probably be done as well. Federal Government need not intervene unless there was pending conflict with another state.

But if the Federal government suddenly decides to pursue 'equality' as a goal, it would find endless justifications to intervene in state's affairs and overrule almost any action that a state might take that didn't adhere strictly to that goal, with an increasingly aggressive set of agencies tasked with overseeing and enforcing the rules.

...which is effectively what has happened over the past 100 years or so.

Still, I see a lot of merit to the experiment as it was originally designed, and rather wish we hadn't run out of frontier space with which to create new polities to test different approaches to governance.

I would point to Jefferson and the anti-Federalist papers as to a non-progressive ideation of equality. Namely, that if we're going to have a republic, it'd be better if everyone was a gentleman-farmer. If the height of American society was somewhere around the wealth and property of the English landed gentry then the distortions that come with the hyperaccumulation of capital would not occur.

But that didn't happen, and if it ever was real then it was definitely squashed after the civil war. The bourgeois won, and with it, the idea of independent democratic experiment-making died too. The American federal government made very sure that landholding elite classes could not resist industrial capital for a reason. And once you have carpetbaggers funded by out of state capital to run for offices everywhere, you no longer have local government, or local politics.

Obama and McCain's electoral contest was the ultimate contest of carpetbagging, neither of them being born in the United States proper. If you want local government, you want local elites.

As an aside, if this isn't too off-topic, in fifteen minutes of Motte browsing I have now encountered the word assabiyah twice, having never seen it before. What's the pronunciation? And from whence the apparently now popular usage?

no clue on pronunciation, but the popularity comes from it being introduced to the rationalist lexicon by (I believe) Talib, and then absolutely run into the ground by an extremely prolific single-issue poster back in the reddit days. This guy would post between three and five very large top-level comments and a whole host of replies each week, all of them centering on "assabiyah", to the point that every poster unfortunate enough to have been here at the time has the word carved indelibly into their forebrain. It's sort of a meme for the old-timers now.

I must have missed it; thanks very much for the clarification.

Ibn Kaldun was an Arab sociologist (the first of his field) and, exceptionally for a man of his time, did not accept the 'god willed it' explanation for why the Rashidun Caliphate collapsed. He came up with a term to describe the social cohesiveness and trust of society that degraded over time (of which I would call social capital).

It serves as a warning to elites who assume a high-trust society is a given: that abusing one's legitimacy by acting in arbitrary ways will lead to the decline and decay of one's empire, no matter how divinely guided. A bourgeoise state is reliant on high societal trust for contract enforcement and stability for business. It is the exceptional malefactor that would burn this trust for a temporary boost to quarterly figures.

A fantastically informative post, but you didn't answer either of his questions!

Others had already answered the question, so I felt that adding the historical content would be more helpful than digging up the old SSC post that introduced the concept to the rat sphere in the first place.

I assume it's pronounced "ah-sah-bee-yah," but I wouldn't know for sure and I have zero connection to the culture it came from.

Thanks. I assume the same just following ingrained rules of reading, but apparently it's also spelled asabiyya which would make me want to extend that Y sound. Unless your bee is more of a beee than mine.

And from whence the apparently now popular usage?

There was one guy who loved using it in every post he could. Coming back several times on different alts after being banned for one reason or another. I'm still not sure if it's him again or if finally the word has "memed itself over" into other people's heads.

A canny reader may go, 'ah, but you haven't mentioned liberalism! are you an enlightened centrist?' I'm sorry to say, but no. Liberalism is strategically ambiguous: or, in other words, it pretends that the problem doesn't exist. By patching up the most obvious inequalities with welfare programs and other forms of redistributionism, the proponents of liberalism can carry on with the pretense of equality married to a free market system. But because they are ideologically restricted by private property and individual rights, they can only work on the margins, and never truly solve the problem of equality.

What do you mean by "solve the problem of equality"? A system that tries to achieve the massive material gains of the free market while minimizing the economic inequality it necessitates seems like a fine solution to me.

But it is hypocrisy. What Marxists call attempting to resolve the contradictions of capitalism, and what fascists of every stripe call parasitism. And they are correct in their critique that it solves nothing: there is still inequality and no amount of welfarism will remove it.

Now, you can see this as necessary process of the churn of liberal democracy. That's a kind way to look at it. But, and correct me if I misrepresent you, the essence of your response (and what many liberals would also say) is that "I am okay with a permanently unequal society, so as long as it makes token efforts to make me more comfortable living in it."

Which is a... worldview.

There is only one natural right in man, and that is the ability to do violence.

All other rights spring from this basic fact. We have social and political rights because someone in history stuck a bayonet in someone else who was trying to deny those. Any right not backed by violence will wither and disappear in short order.

The last argument of kings is the final right of every man.

While I believe there is a lot of truth in what you say, I think there is one other wellspring of "natural rights": social status games.

Sure, sometimes social status games are backed by violence, or the threat of violence, but consider something like accessibility laws for disabled people. There is no risk of disabled people violently uprising against the state, and the vast majority of people would not raise arms against the government if the government got rid of wheelchair ramps, etc.

So, why do we have accesibility laws in most of the developed world? It is because throwing a bone to disabled people imposes a small enough dead weight loss on the economy, and a large enough increase in the prestige of Western institutions among Western elites that the ruling party is willing to use political capital to do it. (Or the reputation and prestige lost for undoing it is too large to truly contemplate.)

Violence is important, but it isn't everything.

Social status games are just violence with extra steps.

Also, the ADA is not about disabled people, disabled people are a McGuffin to let big capitalism strangle small capitalism.

Disabled access laws are class warfare intended to enrich trial lawyers and bankrupt small businesses.

It's using the violence of the state to enrich the parts of the economy who will not miss the "dead weight loss" because they build a new store every week, rather than the parts which have a legacy building which is harder and more expensive to retrofit.

There's no status here, no morals and no ideology. Just violence and money. Status is what gets sold to the rubes.

Well, of course. It is implicit.

But bringing up this fact ignores the past thousand years of political development, namely, that we live in the era that states have monopolies on force. It brings to mind the sort of self-representing lawsuit maker who smugly brings up the Magna Carta at his trial for tax evasion. Yes, we understand the principle, but it's not very useful for our purposes.

Your formulation is incorrect, however. Men have a right to self-defense in the preservation of their own lives, not murder. And through this lense we extend this sense of self to the material (private property) and the abstract (autonomy of action.) Unless you are so radical that you say you have the right to kill anyone you please.

Which, of course, is fine. But then I'd have to report you for strange notions.

we live in the era that states have monopolies on force.

No, we don't. From Prigozhin to Weaver to Rittenhouse, our modern states have long lost (if they ever had) any sort of monopoly on violence.

Your formulation is incorrect, however. Men have a right to self-defense in the preservation of their own lives, not murder.

Obviously I disagree. All rights can be misused, but the right is underlying, ineradicable. A right means nothing if it is only the right to do something in a manner prescribed by society in a given time and place. Violence is always an option, if not always the smart or moral one. Point is, the right is "unalienable" in a very real sense. Nobody can take it from you. Because of this, it underwrites all other rights, because if they are trampled far enough, we can activate the most ancient and powerful of all rights.

Thanks, Mao.

I think you’re overlooking something. Violence is uncertainty. Both about who will prevail and who expects to prevail. We have social and political rights because someone decided to stack the odds in his favor by bringing a friend.

Individual violence is nothing compared to coordinated violence. Cultivating and expending credibility such that other people are your friends and not your enemies’. Or, better yet, to extend the uncertainty in your favor, and let you bluff more strength than you might truly be able to draw. This is where @vorpa_glavo’s status games come in: does that chief command fifty spears or just ten? Will his sons move heaven and earth to avenge him, or let old insults lie?

Social bonds are the fundamental right of humanity. And thanks to the unreliability of people, they supersede any individual capacity for violence.

Violence is uncertainty. Both about who will prevail and who expects to prevail.

I most certainly do not overlook this, it's what makes the system as fair as anything else that exists.

The rest of your comment seems to think that I said violence was the best political system, but that is not my argument. How power is produced from violence is a corrupt and despicable business, but we call it politics. None of that impacts my argument that violence is the only inherent human right.

It is the only method by which the truly disadvantaged can inject some uncertainty into their otherwise certain outcomes.

Sorry, I wasn’t clear. I didn’t read you as claiming violence was the best political system. My point was that social games—scheming and alliances—are a more effective method for achieving goals than mere violence. They scale better, and leverage the uncertainty of violence. They also carry much less opportunity cost. I think this makes socialization, or perhaps simply speech, an inherent human right. Political power comes from the barrel of a gun, but it doesn’t have to be your gun.

It is the only method by which the truly disadvantaged can inject some uncertainty into their otherwise certain outcomes.

This is true, but only for what I think is a vanishingly narrow definition. It is a rare outlaw indeed who can’t leverage social ties. Even if he only does so to amplify his violence, he will get more with cooperation and threats than with the acts themselves.

a more effective method for achieving goals

the only truly unalienable right

I think you're arguing something I'm not arguing against.

Social bonds are the fundamental right of humanity.

...I don't think I'd fully agree with this statement, but it is one of the most interesting insights I've seen here in quite some time. It crystalizes some of the serious doubts I've had about my understanding of Hobbes' argument in Leviathan: is the state of nature, the war of all against all that founds his argument, something that does or has ever actually existed? Has there ever been a moment when alliances did not exist?

Isn't it a war of subsets of all against subsets of all, and Hobbes was just being concise?

Isn't it a war of subsets of all against subsets of all, and Hobbes was just being concise?

In that case, how can we ever be said to have escaped the state of nature? There's never been a time when there was no conflict between subsets of all either. It's entirely possible that I'm misunderstanding his theory, but the above post has me curious if this is another example of false knowledge, something we all sort of assumed was accurate because it sounded plausible.

I’m inclined to agree with @Southkraut and say that “all vs. all” is a figure of speech. While I don’t know where Hobbes would draw the line, I doubt he denied kinship bonds; they’re just categorically different than larger organizations. I’d put the transition around Dunbar’s number.

But then, I’m not sure I’ve fully internalized Unflattening Hobbes.

I feel like social contract theory gets at a lot of this.

The 'so long as he does not impunge on the commons' part of B is where a lot of the practical considerations are hidden, given that there's essentially zero land on the planet that isn't claimed by some person or entity already. Natural rights make a lot of sense if you are talking about an unclaimed frontier, but once everything is already claimed, the whole 'what nature provides' thing stops being practically relevant, and all your discussions are about the relationships between people and the things they own.

And when we're talking about that, I'm pretty happy saying something like: No, people do not have the natural right to be protected from the consequences of their bad decisions, nor even from the slings and arrow of outrageous fortune. that they had no control over.

But people do have the natural right to cooperate on projects, and one of those projects can be something like 'a democratic government concerned with the general welfare of the people inside it, including shielding them from suffering and harm whatever the origin'.

And it turns out that's a pretty popular project that a lot of people like and want to get on board with.

And once a project like that has laid claim to a certain plot of land, it has the natural right to use that land however it wants, including saying 'anyone who lives on our land has to pay such-and-such taxes to be used for such-and-such purposes, and will get one vote to influence everything the project does including those taxes and that spending'.

At that point, I feel like natural rights have pretty much been satisfied and are not very relevant to the everyday questions about what the people in that project decide to do anymore. Aside form ensuring exit rights, which the US at least has.

If someone imagined that such a project did not exist and that the land they lived on was not owned by such a project, then they might think that they were still in the state of nature where their natural rights predominated. But they'd simply be mistaken.

You cannot deduce that people are not born equal from the fact their parents are not equal, it's a mistake. There is a missing argument here. Indeed, assume that A is 10 times richer than B, but A has 10 children and B only has 1. Then the children are born equal, aren't they?

And also, the richest are only rich because everyone else is somewhat rich. You can only sell iphones or cars to people that are somewhat rich. Even amazon needs people to have phones or computers. So it regulates itself a little bit. I suspect the richest become relatively richer because the population grows. If you take 0.1 cent by product sold, it helps that there are more people.

There is some marginal benefit to being the child of a rich person. (Otherwise, there would be no mechanisms to preserve elite status over generations other than by gene transfer.) I think if people were given the choice of being the only child of a Sub-Saharan African or the hundredth (thousandth?) child of Elon Musk, they'd choose the latter every time.

My point being is that it doesn't matter how affluent the society as a whole is: so as long as hedonic escalation is a thing, people will always resent and have jealousy for people more well off then them (even if, relative to everyone else, they are wealthier than everyone on the planet.) We are nowhere near that state in the modern day: the ones with the greatest chip in their shoulders against the 1% are the fantastically wealthy American underclass.

The Musk example is bad, because Musk is more than thousand times richer than a subsaharan african, children cannot choose their parents, and Musk does not have 1000 children so it's particularly meaningless. And no, it's not better to be the billionth child of Musk than the child of an average american.

But anyway that wasn't my point. My point was that you cannot deduce your conclusion from your hypothesis. Maybe your conclusion is still right, but it remains to prove.

i have never actually seen communists advocate for everyone to have the exact same standards of living, that always felt to me like a strawman from capitalists pretending to explain what communists believe to other capitalists

A) Men are not born with equal talent and ability. Therefore

B) The choices they make with their capital are not equally wise. Over time...>

C) Men are not born into equal prosperity and circumstance, compounding with the effects of A.

This statement seems trivially true. Everyone knows someone in their lives who makes smart decisions with their money and someone who makes dumb decisions with them. But the very notion that this over time will lead to a hierarchal and oligarchic character of their society is viscerally offensive to many. The reaction to this dilemma is the underlying problem of all modern political ideologies.

you gloss over C, but that is the only problem communists see with capitalism, because "make your money work for you" is a thing in capitalism, where if you inherit enough money it takes no talent to then hire an advisor and let him invest your money, giving you free capital for 0 work or talent

in communism, people have different standards of living as well as authority depending on their credentials, track record etc., it is a real attempt at meritocracy, the only thing they get rid of is the feedback loop of rich getting richer for no reason than that they were already rich to begin with

A Moon landing, by any other word, would be as beautiful, wouldn't it?

The invitations to the recent G20 summit refered to Droupadi Murmu as "The President of Bharat". While the prime minister of the host country was delivering the inaugural address, the placard in front of him said "Bharat".

No, a new country didn't emerge and somehow got the right to host something as prestigous as a G20 summit, "Bharat" is actually an endonym, explicitly established, in Indian constitution:

India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States.

This move to use Bharat in internationally visible context can be seen as normalizing and laying the ground work to a full-on name change. The motivation behind is by some commentators impugned to be Hindutva, the ideology of, in the opinion of these commentators, of "othering" non-Hindu groups. The logic being that India being an English word privileges English speaking-Indian, but since they lack an Asabiyyah, this isn't as dangerous affirming the Hindu name, empowring Hindus who do not lack it.

A more concrete explanation also proposed, has been to make the name of an opposition coalition (I.N.D.I.A., yes their name is the just name of the country) seem more foreign and less Bharatian.¹

One is drawn to make comparisons with recent country renaming, the country of Cahit Arf. Both Bharat and Türkiye are at least regional powers, so their renaming is expected to be reported more widely and considered of greater importance than Swaziland or Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia "getting the works". And as in both cases the name change would be the result of the countries free will², the comparison seems even more salient.

Homeland of baklava is a bit further along, already notifying international organizations "Turkey" is a deadname. It seems media organizations haven't followed suit; out of the following only the last two affirm the new name: CNN, WaPo, NYT, NPR, CBC, NHK English, Al Jazeera, BBC, Reuters, USA Today, AP, The Guardian, Fox News, Euronews (the tag for stories pertaining to this country is called "Turkiye (Turkey)"), CGTN³, ABC Australia. But FYROM was abandoned by news media in favour of NM, that the former official name was so long probably played a part. Yet Czechia is still mostly commonly called Czech Republic, despite the latter being longer.

1: Particular political parties appropriating symbols of the whole country, has also happened in Italy. The "Brothers of Italy" a far-righty political party you may have heard about if you follow European politics, is in Italian called "Fratelli d'Italia" after the incipit of the Italian anthem.

2: Unlike with Macedonia, North. In order for Greece to allow the former Vardar Banovina to join EU and NATO, an agreement had to signed by NM to distance itself from promoting their is continuity between Macedonians of antiquity and Macedonians of today and to insistently preprend "North" to every reference to the country.

3: The style guide of China Global Television Network prescribes calling the country the capital of which is Pyongyang, DPRK, but the one with the capital Seoul, South Korea. Strangely inconsistent.

I had a conversation over the weekend with a friend that is now compelled to write "Türkiye" in all formal documentation and I must confess that I'm absolutely baffled by why anyone is agreeing to play along with the petty power games of renaming the country. Many, many countries have different local names than what they're referred to as internationally or in other languages, and pretty much no one cares about these distinctions as anything other than petty provincialism. I will be very surprised if the residents of Deutschland start taking offense to being called Germany, or if the English decide to call the pasta homeland Italia. I have no intention of demanding that Mexicans who say "Estados Unidos" knock it off and learn some goddamned English. Nippon doesn't usually go by Nippon internationally, and if it did, that would still just be a weird Anglicization of the actual Japanese.

I know I'm going to look like a total boomer, and a low-class one at that, but I will still be writing Turkey and India for the foreseeable future, along with ordering Chicken Key-Ehv rather than Chicken Keeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeev.

These kind of petty power games have a long long history, though. They’re also more appealing to countries that feel like they need to throw their weight around. Japan and the US and Germany don’t.

I still call it Constantinople.

No you can't go back

It’s like a password reset—you could do Constantinople1 though.

All I see is “***************”!

What's wrong with Byzantium?

Sailing to Byzantium BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

I

That is no country for old men. The young In one another's arms, birds in the trees, —Those dying generations—at their song, The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. Caught in that sensual music all neglect Monuments of unageing intellect.

II

An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress, Nor is there singing school but studying Monuments of its own magnificence; And therefore I have sailed the seas and come To the holy city of Byzantium.

III

O sages standing in God's holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall, Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, And be the singing-masters of my soul. Consume my heart away; sick with desire And fastened to a dying animal It knows not what it is; and gather me Into the artifice of eternity.

IV

Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Sailing to Constantinople is one off my favourite tracks from the Assassins Creed Revelations soundtrack.

If you add two spaces at tend of a line, that will cause a line break in Markdown.

Very useful for poetry.

Thank you, I struggle with the formatting on here because I'm sure when I post that I've got it right, then it looks wonky once it's posted and not in preview.

People go along because it makes them feel less like a low-brow hick when they use the anti-colonial native language name for the place. It’s a mostly free virtue signal, and a way to look down on those bores who still insist on using the English names. Those going along with the name changes in Bharat or Türkiye don’t care what they call us.

This move to use Bharat in internationally visible context can be seen as normalizing and laying the ground work to a full-on name change. The motivation behind is by some commentators impugned to be Hindutva, the ideology of, in the opinion of these commentators, of "othering" non-Hindu groups. The logic being that India being an English word privileges English speaking-Indian, but since they lack an Asabiyyah, this isn't as dangerous affirming the Hindu name, empowring Hindus who do not lack it.

Instead of framing this as a Hindus vs Everyone Else kind of deal, in my eyes it's more emblematic of another major cultural divide in India, namely the North vs the South.

North India is majority Hindi speaking, whereas the southern states speak Tamil, Telegu and the like instead.

The latter have long been peeved about the BJP government's* tendency to name new projects/initiatives with Hindi terms, or outright rename the old commonly established English ones. This is seen as a form of cultural imperialism or at least chauvinism, since it alienates people from the south who might not be fluent or even conversant in Hindi.

*To be fair, the INC did plenty of Hindi-washing too, the BJP just leans into it more and unapologetically so.

English, while a foreign language, is still the lingua franca for educated Indians, and while Hindi has become far more common in the youth born of non-Hindi speaking parents, many prefer to use a "neutral" language instead of one that implicitly preferences one regional language, which despite what some might claim, is far from universal.

Of course there's a bit of the 'ol alienation of Muslims afoot, but this is a topic that pisses off even the orthodox Hindu majority down south.

As far as I'm concerned, Bharat just sounds way worse than India, and there's no real reason for a switch beyond inflating Modi's ego.

Isn't the name for India in most southern languages also Bharat or something close to it?

It is, but they usually don't refer to it as anything but India. Bharat is more common up north.

I am South Indian (from Karnataka to be specific).

India and Bharat are both equally palatable to me or anyone else I know, though Bharat (or in Kannada Bharata) is rarely used out of formal contexts.

I suspect that in the South Indian context the name will only cause indigestion for Periyarists from Tamil Nadu. Others won't really care.

Edit: In Karnataka, the few people who do care, namely Kannada activists in the Old Mysore region only have the issue that Bharata as it is written in Sanskrit is a more accurate name with Bharat being a bastardization of the name by Hindi.

I see, thanks for clearing that up!

I hope this sort of things really takes off and we have to learn Chinese characters so we can correctly refer to China as 中国. Failing that, we should at least have the Basic Decency™ to refer to it by its rightful name: "The Middle Kingdom".

Another fun example of this is the Mormon Church, which gets persnickety when you fail to refer to it as the Jesus Christ Church of Latter Day Saints. As you see, they are a typical Christian denomination like any other.

I think Scott's strategy of surrendering when 70% of people use the new name is a decent way of going about things, but I'd personally fight a little longer, say to 90%. You may call it Myanmar, but it will always be Burma to me.

My general rule is to use the common English name of a place when speaking English, and to not agree to use a new name as long as there’s reason to dispute the neutrality of the name change. The first rule is about preventing confusion.

Not everyone is going to know what Bharat, Zhongguo or tlingan wo’ not everyone could identify those places. If I give the English names, then I’m communicating much better. Another benefit is that it avoids the fault of pretending at being sophisticated which a fair number of liberals especially love to do. It feels more knowledgeable to the speaker if they can say the name in a more native way, either by pronunciation or by using a native name. So saying México makes you sound more educated than the locals calling it Mexico. And it ends up, for me, coming off a bit snobbish like they’re to good to use normal standard names for things.

On the other hand, especially when it comes to politically charged territories, the names chosen and used can have pretty significant influence on the future direction of policy. Calling Taiwan by different names would have pretty serious implications in signaling your position on their status as an independent country. Taiwan, Formosa, Republic of China, and Chinese Taipei all refer to the same island, but if Joe Biden suddenly starts talking about Taiwan as The Republic of China, that’s pretty much saying that we recognize Taiwan as an independent nation. Likewise, if we suddenly start calling the island Chinese Taipei, we’re telling China we don’t recognize Taiwan as independent. It seems most reasonable to choose the most neutral term possible so that you don’t sneak in beliefs that you aren’t necessarily thinking about.

I do think the case of Taiwan is a pretty good example where using alternate terminology is just imprecise, and not more sophisticated.

Among the "main options" for positions to support:

  1. Status quo
  2. De facto separate self-governing
  3. Special administrative region
  4. De jure independence
  5. Unification under ROC (I would have thought implausible, but maybe people thought the same thing for Germany)
  6. Annexation under PRC

The term "Taiwan" is probably the most neutral term, though it could indicate support for options 1, 2, 3, or 4? The term "Formosa" alone could indicate support for options 1, 2, or 4?? Saying "A/The (New) Republic of Formosa" is probably unambiguously supportive of option 4. The term "Republic of China" could indicate support for options 1 or 5? Lastly, "Chinese Taipei" could indicate support for options 1, 3, or 6?

If my intent is not to signal support for any specific opinion, I think Taiwan is the best name to use. And the problem with choosing to use things that imply too much is that they can be used to undercut other positions. If I could somehow enforce on everyone that they must call Taiwan “Republic of China” and especially if I could silence anyone who disagreed, it then becomes hard to make the case that we shouldn’t back Republic of China because you lack the ability to outright deny the independence claim. Ukraine, early on, used this to their advantage by insisting on the proper spelling (Kyiv over the Russian version of Kiev) using Ukraine over The Ukraine, insisting that the only correct way to refer to the war was the Russian invasion of Ukraine over other variants like Russia-Ukraine war. By doing this, it’s a lot harder to point out things that go against the narrative set out.

It feels more knowledgeable to the speaker if they can say the name in a more native way, either by pronunciation or by using a native name.

That’s exactly the problem- literati get the pronunciation wrong with native names very frequently. Kyiv is pronounced ‘Ki-eev’ not ‘keev’. Bharat is pronounced with a sound that doesn’t even exist in English. Etc, etc.

If you can’t pronounce it just use the English name.

the fault of pretending at being sophisticated which a fair number of liberals especially love to do.

God forbid someone wants to look sophisticated. Next thing you know, they’ll be hanging around Internet forums, trying to explain how their outgroup is the real snobs.

I don’t care about just wanting to look sophisticated. But I think it’s a bit rich, especially when those same people haven’t ever learned anything about Bharat, for example, outside of what can be gleaned from travel videos, National Geographic, or the like.

Now that you mention it, it is a bit odd that we still use the Roman slur for Deutschland. I guess when you lose two world wars to the almighty Anglo nobody cares about your culture.

Another factor is that "Deutschland" not being the homeland of the Dutch would be incredibly confusing. Even more than it already is.

Is it really any more confusing than Slovakia and Slovenia?

It's must less egregious then cases like Turkey or Thailand. At least the Dutch came from Deutschland and the Deutsch are still almost entirely descended from those original people.

It's not really a slur by modern understanding, though. "Germanisch" is widely used in german science as well to refer to just about everything descendant from germanic tribes.

My bigger gripe is that in german, the important "deutsch vs germanisch" distinction is very obvious linguistically, while the "german vs germanic" distinction is super awkward in english. "Deutschland/germany" is a specific country in middle europe, "germanisch/germanic" is an extremely large and diffuse group that can refer to the majority of the developed world depending on your criteria (for example, germanic languages includes the scandinavian group and english).

One is drawn to make comparisons with recent country renaming, the country of Cahit Arf.

For a moment I genuinely thought that some African country or whatever had named itself "Cahit Arf" and I somehow just hadn't noticed.

Interestingly the Irish did the inverse, it's considered offensive at worst and archaic at best to call the country Éire in English.

It's a weird one alright. Wikipedia goes into a surprising amount of length on why this is the case.

As far as I can tell "Éire" isn't offensive in itself, but can imply disrespect in the context of a long history of the British government using any term but 'Ireland' in official documents and treaties (Southern Ireland, the Irish Republic, the Republic of Ireland), and protesting when the country was addressed as 'Ireland' in EEC and UN meetings. Ireland's constitution used to claim the entire island so it makes sense why Unionists in Northern Ireland would push for the British government to avoid the unqualified name.

It's the Brits doing their subtly snobbish, disparaging thing again, and hiding it under "What? That's the name you lot picked!"

Imagine if they kept referring to "the thirteen united States of America" because that's what is in the Declaration of Independence.

As mentioned in the link above, it wasn't a subtle snobbish thing. The British insisted on disambiguating the country from the island by calling the country "Republic of Ireland" or "Eire" and the island "Ireland", because the country was promoting an irridentist claim on the British-ruled part of the island (i.e. Northern Ireland) that the British quite properly were not willing to play games with. De Valera didn't hide the fact that insisting on "Ireland" for both in international fora was part of a campaign to tar British rule in Northern Ireland as illegitimate. That the Irish objection to "Republic of Ireland" was made in bad faith is demonstrated by the Irish Government using "Republic of Ireland" on the rare occasions when they needed to disambiguate.

After the Good Friday Agreement, the Irish formally dropped their claim to Northern Ireland, and the British Government stopped trying to call the country anything other than "Ireland". As of the current year, British people calling Ireland "Eire" or (less so) "Republic of Ireland" is a dog whistle for opposition to to the GFA.

…what event are you talking about? The founding?

As I understand it, the United States dates back to the Revolution, but the preceding name was “United colonies.” That suggests the statehood, rather than the unity, was emphasized.

From the article that you linked:

The phrase "United States" was originally plural, a description of a collection of independent states—e.g., "the United States are"—including in the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1865. The singular form became popular after the end of the Civil War, and is now standard. The difference is more significant than usage; it is a difference between a collection of states and a unit.

Guess I missed that.

India, that is Bharat, shall be a Union of States.

The Hindi constitution begins with a "Bharat, as in India" to doubly drive home the order agnostic nature of those names.

"othering" non-Hindu groups

The original name is derived from the Indus = Sindhu = Hindi, and the the other option was Hindus-stan. Given that context, Bharat is easily the least Hindu of all 3 names.

Modi suggested - not calling them I.N.D.I.A but "Ghamandiya"; the Hindi word for arrogant.

Petty politics aside, that's a good comeback.

I don't know about other renamings, but India - Bharat - Hindustan have always been interchangeable to me. I avoid using Hindu-stan because it evokes analogies to our neighbor: Pakistan has used its name to erase all plurality within its borders.

Bharat is the natural name that comes out when speaking Hindi (or any Sanskrit derived language), and India is the one that comes naturally when speaking in English. That being said, when saying it out loud, 'Bharat' evokes a clearer sense of civilizational identity. 'India' on the other hand, feel untethered to the people it represents.

My prediction is that we continue using both terms as we always have. India will switch to calling itself Bharat in official events, but that's about it.

Another semi-relevant thought on country names: many are chosen halfheartedly. A few years ago I looked up why Israel isn't called Judea, and apparently this was indeed the expected name of the Jewish/Zionist state pretty much until a few days before it was announced:

As Clark Clifford, Harry Truman’s legal adviser, would later recall, “most of us assumed the new nation would be called Judaea.”

The reason why Israel couldn't be called Judea (or Judaea) was because Judaea wasn't actually going to be part of Israel:

But according to the partition plan, all of the traditional geographical area of Judea was slated either to be internationalized (in the case of Jerusalem and its environs) or to become part of the proposed Arab state. A Jewish state named Judea that didn’t include the geographical Judea would have been, to say the least, an anomaly. Moreover, even if it did wind up possessing some chunk of Judea, the Jewish state would also comprise a much larger area than that.

This didn't really stop 'North Macedonia', so perhaps times have changed.

The second choice was apparently 'Zion', but again:

With Judea ruled out, another suggestion, Sharef told Brilliant, was Zion—“but Zion is the name of a hill overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem” and therefore not intended by the UN’s partition plan to be within the borders of the proposed Jewish state. True, even the Bible refers to Jerusalem and sometimes to the entire Land of Israel as Zion, and in that sense the name had been adopted by the “Lovers of Zion” movement in the 19th century and then, obviously, by the Zionist movement itself. But for a sovereign Jewish state-to-be, actual geography mattered; how could such a state be called Zion when Mount Zion wasn’t going to be a part of it?

'Israel' was the only other option:

How was the name decided? By a vote in the People’s Administration, the cabinet-in-waiting, on May 12....the cabinet secretary Zeev Sharef would write that the decision was arrived at “in the absence of any other suggestion.”

Of course, within a few decades, Israel would come to control both 'Judea' and Mount Zion, but the country's name stuck.

how could such a state be called Zion when Mount Zion wasn’t going to be a part of it?

As the old quip goes, "you Turks protest against Armenia having Mount Ararat on their coat of arms, but look at your own flag, surely you aren't trying to lay claim to the moon itself?"

I think if any country should change its name it’s Montenegro - “Black Mountain” would sound a lot cooler in English!

Montenegro's endonym is already Crna Gora.

Crna Gora doesn’t sound cool in English though lol

I want to talk about game mods.

I cut my teeth on Doom WADs back in the day. WADs that committed flagrant copyright infringment like Alien or Star Wars TC WADs. WADs that replaced all the pinkies with Barney the purple dinosaur so you could shoot him with your shotgun. I played wacky maps like border1 for Team Fortress. And lets not forget the nude hack for Drakan: Order of the Flame. Or the plethora of offensive or innapropriate character models modded into every Quake.

Back then, I don't remember there being any sort of centralized modding sites. The Doom wads I actually found at local computer shows, probably sold "illegally" on a handful of floppies. Many of the maps or models would just download automatically when you joined a private server in Quake 1/2/3. At least I think they did? Maybe not Quake 1. And it's utterly inconceivable to me that id Software would have issued any sort of statement about the offensive material being made for their game, counter cultural as they were. I sincerely doubt they would have put any thought to it what so ever. It was simply somebody else's business.

Perusing Based Mods, a collection of mods generally banned from everywhere else, paints a grim picture of the political landscape of modding. I hate that I even have to use the phrase "political landscape of modding". Doing whatever the fuck you want with something you own should not be a political act. Alas, here we are.

Many of the mods follow a theme. Removing LGBT flags or pronoun selection from games. A few go further and remove homosexuality as content from games. Some remove anachronistic or nonsensicle diversity from games. Some just make all the people white because fuck it why not? A few are more accurate localizations versus whatever Americanized nonsense activist put out stateside. Like restoring the submissive personality to characters which localizers decided had to be more girl bossy.

The latest one I've seen which hasn't been banned everywhere, but which none the less appears to be walking a thin line, is the Better Aesthetics mod for Baldur's Gate 3. I'll let it speak for itself.

Baldur's Better Aesthetics is an attempt to make Baldur's Gate 3 look more like Faerûn as we know it. More Dwarves will have beards, more Duergar will be bald (including the women!), and fewer Githyanki will be sporting big ol' whiskers. You will also notice fewer people from Chult, but more from Calimshan, and there will no longer be ANY Half-Orcs with pink hair. Please note, these changes aren't universal. A couple of Dwarves have assimilated and gone clean-shaven, and a few lore-accurate descendants of Chultan foreigners remain (like the legendary Duke Ulder Ravengard). But you will certainly notice a difference!

I actually found this thread discussing the changes it made, and the lore reasons for them, interesting. In fact, it turned Baldur's Gate 3 into the Sword Coast I more or less recognize from Baldur's Gate 1 and 2! None the less, at an object level it makes Baldur's Gate 3 less "diverse", and thus it's problematic. I can't say for certain, but I find it suspicious there is zero mention of it on the Baldur's Gate 3 subreddit. The single mention of it on the Steam forums is locked. Zero mention on the GOG forum for the game. I can't say for certain the existence of this mod is being broadly censored from the usual captured spaces. But I can't rule it out either.

It's just all so tiring. I go back and play old games, and I'm reminded just how different and natural they are. They don't have weird diversity polemics oozing out of every nook and cranny. Or the crypto-racism of having every evil or stupid character look like me, and every cool, heroic and most importantly moral character look like a Gen Z Nonbinary Zirboss. You aren't constantly confronted with the equivilent of a pride parade every time you meet a new cast of characters. And all the gaslighting about how it's not a big deal, why are we so annoyed by it immediately becomes a huge fucking shut down the internet deal whenever someone takes it back out.

My wife and I have a lot of discussions about what we'll expose our daughter to, and we've more or less decided the cut off is the 90's just to be safe. There were still normal shows, books or games that generally depicted normal cis hetero white families like ours positively. To subject her to modern media feels like child abuse. To the 90's it is. Everything after that is just too damned gay for children.

To add some more context to this post, there is currently a huge flare up in the modding community with Nexusmods (one of the largest modding communities and hosting sites) banning 'anti-woke' mods for some of the recent AAA releases of Starfield and Baldurs Gate 3. Besides the example of the BG 3 mod above, a recently banned Starfield mod involved the removal of pronouns during character creation.

Based on the past banning of a mod for Spiderman Remastered (involving the replacement of LGBT pride flags with American flags), Nexusmods' justification for banning anti-woke mods is as follows:

"We aren't the authority on what users can and cannot mod. Us removing a mod only means it cannot be found at Nexus Mods, nothing more, nothing less. We also note that we are not the only site that has removed this mod from their platform. As a private business, we have a right to choose what content we do and do not want to host on our platform. Respect this right the same way you want respect for your rights."

Starfield Steam discussion forum is currently a raging dumpster fire of trolling, woke and anti-woke commentary.

/r/kotakuinaction, one of the residual anti-woke communities still around after gamergate, has a lot of discussion about the forced inclusion of diversity in gaming issue and seems to 'follow the money' of forced diversity in modern games into the prevalence of ESG scores attracting investors.

Edit: Large discussion thread of this issue in the Starfield Steam forum here.

The Spider-Man one is particularly egregious, because the modder just combined the textures from the Saudi Arabian release of the game with English text. As it turns out, the game makers are totally happy to make and profit from LGBT-free version of the game, as long as it’s not Americans who enjoy it.

Doing whatever the fuck you want with something you own should not be a political act. Alas, here we are.

It's one thing to say that, for example, watching MCU movies because they're "in" at the moment doesn't mean you endorse the idea of capitalism, it's quite another to say that your very deliberate modding choices don't at the very least say something about where your lines are. I explicitly use mods that many others find discomforting or crude because I don't ultimately care. But I wouldn't turn it back around and ask "Why are these people criticizing me????" The criticisms are coherent, I just reject them in the end.

Stardew Valley has had mods that turn the sole canonically black character and his half-black, half-white daughter totally white. I very much doubt this is because people thought he didn't fit in organically, he explicitly has an outsider background (comes from the city to the town). It's entirely valid to ask why someone may want a mod that turns this character white.

I say this as someone who agrees with your position on such mods. I truly don't give a fuck about someone making everyone in a game white or removing LGBT flags from a game, and I think mods that allow you to do those things are ultimately fine, just as mods that do the opposite are equally fine. But I'm not going to pretend the criticisms are invalid - I just don't share the values of those critics.

And all the gaslighting about how it's not a big deal, why are we so annoyed by it immediately becomes a huge fucking shut down the internet deal whenever someone takes it back out.

Probably because there's a lot of people who seem to think this man had a valid point. But what do I know, maybe all the people making a stand against indoctrination are shaking their heads at a man complaining about the expansion of an option that he could have gotten through in seconds.

By all means, I'll march alongside you when you want to complain about "pale, male, stale" is a thing. But I'm going to look at you quizzically if you also want to defend the idea that games shouldn't even try to be inclusive to people who aren't like you.

By all means, I'll march alongside you when you want to complain about "pale, male, stale" is a thing. But I'm going to look at you quizzically if you also want to defend the idea that games shouldn't even try to be inclusive to people who aren't like you.

I mean, I think I made my case clear. There is "inclusive" and then there is weird, demoralization propaganda where everyone who looks like me is evil and families that look like mine have been utterly extirpated or portrayed in a manner of existential horror. And having found myself facing an abundance of media which very plainly hates me, I'm extra sensitive to the slightest hint of it anymore. Because not unlike how there is a weird bundling of political positions that theoretically have nothing to do with one another, but are none the less all or none, and sorted (perhaps falsely) as being either Republican or Democrat, I've long been subjected to "inclusive" media that barely seems to be about being inclusive, and instead seems to be about promoting hatred of white people and all their works. So I want all of it gone from my household.

I've long been subjected to "inclusive" media that barely seems to be about being inclusive, and instead seems to be about promoting hatred of white people and all their works. So I want all of it gone from my household.

Is this really present in Baldur's Gate 3? Two of the most prominent party characters, Gale and Astarion, are white men (Astarion is, in fairness, a half-elf). Halsin is a white guy (another elf, though). Then there's Minsc and Volo, both white male humans.

I guess Wyll, the one black guy, is arguably the most "moral" character in the party.

The three main "bad guys" are Ketheric Thorm (white male elf), Gortash (white male human), and Orin (uh, I guess she's a white woman? She's visually an eldritch abomination). Ketheric, especially, is a pretty tragic character, though, and not portrayed as generically evil. Minor bad guys include Cazador, an Asian human vampire, and the Mother Superior, a female drow.

All of that to say, I feel like BG3 is definitely trying to be "diverse," and it's certainly very, very gay... but I don't get that it's "anti-white guys."

In fact, it seems like a really good example of "inclusive media" that isn't trying to promote "hatred of white people and their works." Maybe you could start trying to pick it apart, but then I think that would be pretty similar to the "woke" people who try to do that to other innocuous media.

I mean, I think I made my case clear.

No, I don't think you have. In particular, it is unclear to me which of the following you would agree with.

  1. Any depiction of people in a way I don't like is not acceptable.

  2. Some depictions of people in a way I don't like is not acceptable.

People appeal to 2 quite a bit, but they never quite shake the impression that they actually agree with 1. In particular, when you cite all those kids' cartoons and say that they're just all too gay, you suggest to me that you actually have a problem with gay representation, period.

Full disclosure, I haven't watched those episodes of those shows. Maybe they're just actively trying to make political activists out of your kids. If so, I'll fully agree with you that those shows are not necessarily appropriate for children. But if they're just showing gay people existing like straight people, then yeah, I'm starting to think you at best just aren't differentiating as you say you do.

And having found myself facing an abundance of media which very plainly hates me, I'm extra sensitive to the slightest hint of it anymore.

I see people say that all time. What media are you referring to? Because even in 2023, there is plenty of media that doesn't only demonize straight cis white people.

Once again I'm torn, because I kind of agree with both of you. The biggest problem I have with woke propaganda is the reasoning behind it. If you* are the kind of person who thinks that representation is important, that children who grow up seeing blacks only portrayed as villains will be demoralised or think they can't be heroic, that they can't identify with Luke Skywalker because of the colour of his skin, and that only hateful race obsessed cunts would target a race and paint them as evil - well I can only really assume one thing when you lump every fair skinned ethnicity in together and then consistently paint them as evil. You already said that's how you think. Same with men and women.

I am happy to include others, and I think it's totally fucked to interfere with how someone else wants to mod his game even if it's in a way I find disgusting - I am a hajnalbrain cooperatebot after all - but as far as I am concerned the DIE crowd and the neo nazi crowd are two sides of the same coin. Except there's a shitload more of the DIE crowd.

I don't think that's hyperbole. Keep in mind that back when it was black people copping it it was generally out of ignorance at worst - vanishingly few actual racists have held positions of power in the media in the past few decades. Most people were just trying to tell their story the way they'd pictured it while writing, and in a white majority country that's going to consist mostly of white people. But the DIE people are actively malicious. They want to put racists and sexists and homophobes in their place, and the rest of us better cheer them on or they'll come for us next. Fuck that and the horse it rode in on.

*I am sure you will understand I'm using the royal you here, but reading it back I see the way I wrote it is ambiguous, and while you've made your position on the topic quite clear, if I were in your centre left shoes I would be concerned that there was some confusion and that maybe I was expected to answer for the DIE crowd. But I am also not in the mood to rewrite this post, because I can't find a way to sit comfortably in this chair, so I am including this disclaimer instead.

if I were in your centre left shoes I would be concerned that there was some confusion and that maybe I was expected to answer for the DIE crowd.

Not really. I expect anyone reading my post to get to the part that says I don't have a problem with mods that don't flatter DEI.

Ultimately, I do not have a problem with someone wanting to discuss why the DEI messaging in media is offputting to them. I am sympathetic to the idea and think that creators of all sizes can do better with this. IF you want to say that the anti-men message in a piece of media makes you feel unwelcome, I'm totally onboard with that. But I often find that people don't cleanly cut away at what they find okay or don't, even when they have the tools to make this clear.

Yeah that's fair. The disclaimer was more for Quincy than for you - for a hypothetical centre left me who got it in the queue and thought it was a passive aggressive end run around the be kind rule. Especially since the last sentence is a statement directed at the royal you, which I should have fixed regardless of my discomfort.

It's entirely valid to ask why someone may want a mod that turns this character white.

Why?

For the same reason it's "valid" to judge anyone's media consumption habits when you become aware of them.

If you organically learned that the only media your coworker had consumed in the last year was hardcore mermaid hentai, then that might color your opinion of your coworker, even if you were totally okay with harcore mermaid hentai. Similarly, if you learned your female coworker only consumed reality television, trashy romance novels and fan fiction for series she had never read or watched, you might not look at her the same way afterwards.

If someone in your orbit decides to add a mod that turns all the characters into BIPOC they/thems, and you became aware of it, would you not immediately jump to a conclusion on why they might have done such a mod? Modifying the media you consume is theoretically morally neutral and apolitical, but once your media habits become public they are subject to public scruitiny.

For the same reason it's "valid" to judge anyone's media consumption habits when you become aware of them.

This crystalized something for me I didn't really vocalize.

Nobody needed to be aware of how I modded Doom in 1994. There was no social media. There were no centralized modding repositories making executive decisions about what mods to allow or not. There were people at computer shows slinging floppies, random personal pages, sometimes CD-ROM compilations of just dumps of WADs scraped from god knows where.

I never needed to complain that the Kill Barney mod got taken down. There was never a pro shooting Barney and an anti shooting Barney faction arguing about it who you had to cast you lot in with. Nobody needed to set up a dissident host for Barney shooting mods. It was just... in the aether. It was out there. You knew some people liked it, and maybe some people didn't, but it was unquantifiable and frictionless, and totally nobody else's business.

It's this spirit of "nobody else's business" that has been lost. Because now it seems broadly accepted that media can be harmful, and so it's in everybody's interest to police all the media everyone else is consuming to make sure they aren't a harmful person. Shit, it's gotten to me too. My above screeds absolutely betray that I to believe the media you consume can be harmful. My bugbear is demoralization propaganda. I want it out of my house, away from my children. I refuse to patronize peddlers of it. I despair at how prevalent it is in our culture. I die a little inside when old friends I haven't seen in a while, who've been getting all the NPC updates, make casual disparaging remarks about how terrible white people are apropo of nothing. There is a sense of "Shit, they got to you too?"

There were actually a pretty big moral uproar about video games modding post-Columbine -- one of the shooters allegedly modded Doom! and this drove a whole bunch of activism -- though it's (thankfully) been mostly forgotten since.

Yeah, but that was people on the outside throwing an ignorant temper tantrum. Not people on the inside proactively instituting wide ranging systems of control to try to suppress illicit mods.

I wouldn't particularly care about any of the examples you mentioned (my opinion, in as much as it might be "colored" would be forgotten immediately) unless I had a considerably more influential presence on the person (I e the person enamored of horny mermaids was my young son). This whole idea of "public scrutiny" of others in the way you're describing is foreign to me, though it's possible I haven't clearly understood you.

Because only God himself could alter reality to the point that I wouldn't be capable of wondering why people do what they do, and that guy hasn't been seen in a while.

It's one thing to say that, for example, watching MCU movies because they're "in" at the moment doesn't mean you endorse the idea of capitalism, it's quite another to say that your very deliberate modding choices don't at the very least say something about where your lines are.

Sure, those are two different things, but the important thing is that they're both true. Deliberate modding choices don't tell us anything about where your lines are, except strictly within the realm of deliberate modding choices. To extend any implications outward to something else, like one's political opinions or personal ethics or whatever, is something that needs actual external empirical support. One doesn't get to project one's own worldview onto others and then demand that they be held to that standard.

Sure, we can certainly discuss what it says and how we would go about proving it and so on and so forth. What I reject is that idea that it doesn't say anything about you.

Edit: to more directly address your point, I do not believe that people's modding preferences are so obviously segregated from the rest of their views. In the context of Stardew Valley, I'll afford any person who wants it charity when they say they downloaded a mod that only made the only black person white because they didn't like his art or whatever, but I'll conclude that this person is more likely to be a racist than not.

Anecdotal evidence: there are several mods for Darkest Dungeon that are lewd. I don't believe that people who use them, including me, are misogynists, but I do think people using them aren't opposed to all objectification of people.

What I reject is that idea that it doesn't say anything about you.

In the literal sense, nobody takes the other side of this, though. Trivially, if I make deliberate modding choices, then that tells the world that I made those deliberate modding choices. I think so few non-schizophrenic people would disagree with this as to be irrelevant. So claiming that it says something about me is meaningless: of course it does, because every choice I make trivially tells the world that I made that choice.

The point of contention is on the specific claims about what else these choices imply about me or any other generic choice-maker. E.g. if someone modded Stardew Valley to transform some brown pixels to beige ones, it's entirely possible that such a decision was motivated by the modder's deeply held philosophical/political/personal/etc. views which are bigoted, hateful, or whatever, but that can only be supported by additional external information. And merely knowing that this person made such a mod doesn't actually add any information or give us any data from which to construct the truth about that modder's motivations or beliefs or where their lines are. Again, with the exception of the trivial truth that it tells us a lot about the modder's desire to transform certain pixels.

In the literal sense, nobody takes the other side of this, though. Trivially, if I make deliberate modding choices, then that tells the world that I made those deliberate modding choices.

The OP is clearly saying you cannot infer anything about their beliefs or worldview on the basis of the mods they play. That is what I don't agree with. Those are not trivial things.

if someone modded Stardew Valley to transform some brown pixels to beige ones, it's entirely possible that such a decision was motivated by the modder's deeply held philosophical/political/personal/etc. views which are bigoted, hateful, or whatever, but that can only be supported by additional external information.

Not every possible explanation is equally possible. I don't think people are missing the fact that the mod they were downloading, in the SV example, was explicitly about making a black character white. That context matters. Is it by itself enough to say a person is racist? Maybe not. But it does make it more likely.

The OP is clearly saying you cannot infer anything about their beliefs or worldview on the basis of the mods they play. That is what I don't agree with. Those are not trivial things.

Indeed, and I agree with the OP and disagree with you. "Anything about their beliefs or worldview" is different from "anything [at all]." The deliberate choices one makes when modding falls into the latter category but not in the former category. E.g. if someone decided to make a mod that changed some pixels from brown to beige, it tells us that that person decided to make a mod that changed some pixels from brown to beige, which falls into the latter, but not the former. I doubt the OP would disagree with the notion that a modder deciding to change some pixels from brown to beige tells us that the modder decided to change those pixels from brown to beige, but he can speak for himself, I suppose.

Not every possible explanation is equally possible. I don't think people are missing the fact that the mod they were downloading, in the SV example, was explicitly about making a black character white. That context matters. Is it by itself enough to say a person is racist? Maybe not. But it does make it more likely.

Does it? It's possible that it does, but I dispute that you can believe with any meaningful level of confidence that it does make it more likely. This is the kind of nice-sounding narrative that intuitively makes sense and sounds plausible, and as such, if we believe it without doing the hard empirical work to check that it's true, then we should be highly suspicious that our belief in it is due to how plausible it sounds and how much it is in concordance with our intuitions, rather than how true it is. Again, in that SV example, it is, by itself, absolutely not enough to say the person is racist. Is it enough to imply that that modder is more likely to be racist than the typical SV modder or player? It might be, and it might not be, and we haven't done the hard empirical work to figure out which.

if someone decided to make a mod that changed some pixels from brown to beige, it tells us that that person decided to make a mod that changed some pixels from brown to beige, which falls into the latter, but not the former.

Man, if I killed someone with a gun, I'd love to have you as my defense attorney. "My client didn't intend to kill someone, your honor, he just pulled a piece of metal/plastic on a product he owned while it was aimed at a person for two minutes straight!"

Seriously, what kind of argument even is this? How far do you take this idea that the only thing you can infer from what mods a person downloads is that they downloaded it? By this logic, I could download a mod that changed "white" to "cracker" or "cracker-colored" and no one should assume I'm being racist.

Again, in that SV example, it is, by itself, absolutely not enough to say the person is racist. Is it enough to imply that that modder is more likely to be racist than the typical SV modder or player? It might be, and it might not be, and we haven't done the hard empirical work to figure out which.

So great to hear you agree with me!

Man, if I killed someone with a gun, I'd love to have you as my defense attorney. "My client didn't intend to kill someone, your honor, he just pulled a piece of metal/plastic on a product he owned while it was aimed at a person for two minutes straight!"

This is, to be frank, an insane comparison. Pointing a loaded gun at someone and pulling the trigger is the literal physical act of killing someone, or at least causing injury with the high likelihood of killing. This has no comparison to how changing some pixels - or anything else - for a virtual game relates to racism. There is no physical reality that connects the playing of a game with racism the same way physical reality connects shooting a gun at someone with murder. Many people believe that the contents of a modded game can exacerbate racism, but this is by no means a well-supported view, and is certainly a far less consensus view than "shooting someone with a gun has a high likelihood of kill them," and the leap from "I personally think this mod could exacerbate racism" to "therefore, this modder, even if possibly subconsciously, had racist motivations in creating this mod" is unjustified.

By this logic, I could download a mod that changed "white" to "cracker" or "cracker-colored" and no one should assume I'm being racist.

Absolutely. I would 100% not assume you were a racist and I would defend you as being a non-racist, at least on the basis of this one decision. This would remain just as strong even if, say, you modded Doom to change all demons to cis white men and the player character to an amalgamation of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo. The only conclusion we could draw is that you wanted to make a Doom mod with these properties, and any sort of speculation about your personal beliefs about the politics surrounding people like Kendi, DiAngelo, and cis white men would be just that, speculation, and you would be responsible for exactly none of the speculation that many people could (and would likely) speculate about your principles and beliefs that motivated you to create such a mod.

And, needless to say, in neither your example nor mine, would you actually be being racist, since there's no one to actually be racist towards in a situation where you're just writing some code in a computer and offering other people the choice to download and use that code.

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Not every possible explanation is equally possible. I don't think people are missing the fact that the mod they were downloading, in the SV example, was explicitly about making a black character white. That context matters. Is it by itself enough to say a person is racist? Maybe not. But it does make it more likely.

I will absolutely sign on that race bending established characters is a good sign you are racist. Are you sure you've thought fully through who the racist are as a result of that?

I just said context matters. Why are you trying to get me to say that it doesn't?

Depends. Does your context boil down to "It's only bad when white people do it to black characters"?

Edit: Not a rhetorical question BTW. I'm too used to people using ambiguous claims of "context" to justify blatant double standards. I'm not sure if this is what your invocation is, or if you are agreeing with me that the relentless racebending, genderbending and sexuality bending of established characters is a pretty solid sign of hatred.

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And all the gaslighting about how it's not a big deal, why are we so annoyed by it immediately becomes a huge fucking shut down the internet deal whenever someone takes it back out.

Probably because there's a lot of people who seem to think this man had a valid point. But what do I know, maybe all the people making a stand against indoctrination are shaking their heads at a man complaining about the expansion of an option that he could have gotten through in seconds.

I do not see the relevance of that man to the point at issue, unless your point is that this man is some sort of Dalek against whom all games are zero-sum and existential and therefore both brushing off his complaints as trivial and also banning mods that cater to him are justified tactics to oppose and destroy him.

The relevance of that man is to explain why complaints of "WOKENESS IN GAMES REEEEE" is met with "it's not a big deal". The OP was arguing that he was being gaslit, I'm telling him that the gas lights are on because there's a gas leak.

I agree with him. Your argument would make sense if he complained about ANY game EVER catering to the pronouns crowd, it makes no sense in a context where mods that cater to him are censored.

Except the original post was the one to bring it up in games in general. I'm responding to that.

I'm sorry, I don't see how that changes anything. OP was talking about games in general. You made a point about the gaslighting being justified, because a lot of people seem to agree with the guy you linked to. I'm saying that argument would only make sense if he wanted to purge all wokeness from all games, rather than just complaining about how top corporations are pushing it through it's media.

It's not gaslighting if it's true.

I'm saying that argument would only make sense if he wanted to purge all wokeness from all games, rather than just complaining about how top corporations are pushing it through it's media.

The problem I have with this argument is that the OP called multiple popular kids shows "too damned gay". One of those was Peppa Pig, which the linked article literally just says had a lesbian couple with a child who was friends with the titular character. I assume OP is linking the part he finds problematic, but if so, then he finds it to be unacceptable that a kids show literally depicts a gay family. I even asked explicitly and didn't get a response on what exactly he found problematic about that. The other linked articles aren't much better for making his point.

It is true that one can have separate opinions on video games and kids shows. But I have yet to meet anyone who thinks Peppa Pig is LGBT propaganda and can't comprehend the criticism levied against their modding choices who doesn't also think "wokeness" in video games is a problem, period. I don't place much confidence in WhiningCoil breaking this mold. But I leave it to him to at least offer the defense if he cares to do so.

Like, even if you discount that episode, there's literally dozens of episodes without anything gay in them at all. I should know, I have two small children and have thus watched dozens of episodes of Peppa Pig. And Paw Patrol, similarly lacking in gay themes. Or Cocomelon. Or basically any of the Finnish kids' shows I've seen.

There is a Canadian series called Chip & Potato where some of the titular pug's neighbors are a pair of male zebras raising adopted twins who feature from time to time, but even there they don't actually draw attention to them being gay in any way that I've seen. If anything kids's shows that I've seen almost conspicuously seem to be treading very carefully with this theme.

It's not gaslighting if it's true.

How can it simultaneously be true that woke messaging is not a big deal, and that people should not be allowed any option to remove it?

But I have yet to meet anyone who thinks Peppa Pig is LGBT propaganda and can't comprehend the criticism levied against their modding choices who doesn't also think "wokeness" in video games is a problem, period.

I'm having trouble parsing this sentence. You're saying that if he had his way, he'd just turn the tables on the woke, and censor them, including their mods? If not, I'm not sure I see where you're going with this argument.

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FFXIV's modding world is interesting in a lot of ways, starting with any mod usage technically being an account-bannable offense, and then a broadly progressive-leaning playerbase on top of that. As a result, there's a couple major redistribution sites (NexusMods, xivmodarchive, heliosphere) and then a ton of people who've moved into Discords. And then the more lasse faire mod redistribution sites, in addition the normal array of free speech witches, also had a bunch of things show up that I'm >95% sure were intentionally troll uploads made to highlight contradictions.

To some extent FFXIV Discord's started a philosophy similar to webrings, but it's gotten more of the bad drama parts (up to and including creepy bot-programming stalkers) than the nice community ones, so not impressed.

Vintage Story's modding community seems reasonably laid-back, but then again I just ran into the first furry drifter porn yesterday, so who knows if it'll mostly appeal to that sort of ethos or just be a matter of time before something stupid explodes. One would hope that Seraphs (or kobolds) being clay-colored would avoid some problems; I'm not optimistic.

On the flip side, BasedMods kinda looks pretty pathetic. Yes, it avoids the 'anatomically correct fat cat' problem, but whites-only Rimworld? "Sensible Demographics" for the X series doesn't look like it's even be banned from Steam yet, and it looks like it's just tweaking autogen npc race/genders with some fault lore assumptions (not that anyone /should/ read X-universe lore; it's a mess). Making Fallout New Vegas's two factions literal nazis is so on the nose it's funny, but it's also still the sorta thing that would be derided, rightfully, as shovelware asset flips.

There's some stuff with effort or some grander philosophy, here, but it's a small minority: Fire Emblem and Persona's respective translation controversies (and maybe Atomic Heart? for whatever Russian blackface cartoons count) are presumably the touchstone, perhaps followed by Minecraft's textures, but they're both pretty weak central examples. So ultimately it's kinda hard to make a serious assessment of whether these style of mods are getting ignored in mainstream discussion because they're being censored, or if it's just that no one outside of a few engagement bait farmers (and yes, the don't-force-me-to-pick-pronouns guy couldn't have targeted engagement bait better if he's spelled "morans"). I'd bet both, but I'd not be able to give hugely persuasive arguments.

There's a fairer counterargument that the same standard doesn't get turned the other direction, or even to internal development. P5R's original translation was genuinely garbage, and Spiderman doing the no-pride-flags bit on its for UAE own says a lot; that extra-Prideful Spider-man Remastered Mods don't even bother with the figleaf of the Real World Issues tag that was used to justify banning the no-pride mod is kinda overkill. Most of NexusMods isn't shovelware, but not a small amount is.

On the other hand, even if they're trying to make a political point, they're not exactly needing to do so, or talking to any but the already-converted.

What was wrong with P5R's translation to English? Do you have examples?

From a non-culture-war perspective, there are a number of places that are still stilted, messy, or misleading. This piece is written from a progressive perspective, but it highlights a couple "little goofs", and the game has no small number of them. To be fair, P5R's translation is a vast improvement over the original P5 translation, which had a variety of plain errors almost everywhere, either words being untranslated or entirely incorrectly translated, sometimes to random unrelated words or even opposites of their original meanings. And there's still some janky stuff that's more under the broader problem of localization, like being quizzed on shogi rules in ways that would be hard to English-speakers to even Google.

From a culture war one, P5R is a heavily political piece even compared to the typical Persona game, and a lot of those politics are complex when anyone tries to handle them in other cultures. Previous Persona games have sometimes had this issue: is Naoto Shirogane a trans male or tomboy, greatest thread ever, locked by moderators after a thousand pages -- under Japanese cultural assumptions it's a lot easier to see her pronoun troubles are tied closer to how the often-serious problems Japanese authorities have taking women seriously, while under American (even pre-current trans snafu) this screams gender identity stuff.

((For a more consistently translated (albeit easier) example from the same game, P4's Kanji reads pretty similar, as far as I can tell, from either Japanese or American culture assumptions. His Shadow's very clearly gay, but the Jungian shadow is what a person represses, rather than the whole of what they are; Kanji might be gay or bisexual, but that's just a small portion of his fear of being seen as unmanly for his interests.))

But where P4 is more focused on finding the truth, P5 is about corruption, and aggressively about the interfaces of power between adults and minors, including related to suicide, parenting, and sexuality. So this meant that it touched on things that were far redder-hot. One particularly controversial scene occurs when the protagonist Joker and Ryuji running into and being hit on by a pair of gay guys, first when they visit a local gay district for unrelated reasons and then later at a normal beach.

This is incredibly creepy from a Western perspective, partly because the first scene depends on a lot of context that might not even be obvious to native Japanese speakers (the two are basically sneaking into the Folsom Street Fair for unrelated reasons) and partly because of different social norms and expectations about personal space. It's still meant to be weird in the original, but it's not an actual assault and that's kinda important: part of Ryuji's character arc is explicitly about separating attacks from self-defense from fair punishment and so on, in both directions. These guys are doing something that's outside of the normal and Ryuji doesn't want, but the real answer's that he needs to say no and Ryuji hasn't internalized that -- something that impacts everything from his backstory to some of his behaviors very late in the game.

But it came across as homophobic because these were the only 'real' clearly gay guys you run into through the whole game and they're trying to get into a high schooler's pants so it ... instead had the pair trying to give Ryuji a makeover? Which... doesn't really solve the problem either direction.

There's also a minor character that's probably intended as a transwoman in both translations, and probably was originally a crossdresser (or more accurately something like a Molly) by Western standards, but I don't know that the sorta people that use Based everywhere noticed that one.

I think one of the big issues is the old core playerbase were nerds who approached fiction from the point of view of External Immersion.

"What is this world? what is it's culture? How would their people approach things? What has the universe made clear is normal and what is abnormal"

This is why Grognards still bring up "Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura"

Or they'll play fantasy mods (Anbennar) of Europa Universalis and not think twice about how every primary human faction is European inspired and fantasy races take up the entire rest of the world, creating and effective all European humanity. All with in universe expalantion of Orc slavery explained as reparations to humans for former Orc invasions. Because "well that's just what this universe is"

And this older nerd playerbase thrives on this. The actual diversity of settings is what's appealing about fiction and then their internal logic is to be followed through on.

But that approach to fiction is actually really rare! Most people are Inserters, not Immersers. They play games in order to insert themselves into a universe. What interests them is the challenge of achieving their mindset in each new circumstance. (sidenote: it's a matter of degree. not an either or.) To these people the setting itself is significantly devalued. There's nothing 'there' about making the Forgotten Realms setting stay in character with previously established lore. No instinct of dissonance. In fact each shift in the setting to better align with their perception of the world around them (and remember, most people have an astoundingly poor sense of what the demographics of any given country are. along with a complete inability to distinguish between what's normal in their local area vs the country as a whole) only makes more sense to these people. It feels more immersive for their insertions because it's more intuitive. And it's more intuitive because it's now more familiar. And that's normal.

Even though, personally speaking, I don't find very interesting.

This is why Grognards still bring up "Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura"

Man, that takes me back. Back to a time when I could have engaged with the lore of a fictional universe in good faith. When, at least it felt like, or I was naive enough to believe, the authors of these games were doing honest speculative fiction and not blatant agenda pushing.

The games have certainly changed. But so have I. The trust I had that these entertainment companies weren't pushing weird, fringe, hateful ideologies is broken. There have been enough overt examples, and enough anti-white racist tirades on Twitter by game devs, that I can't help but side eye every narrative choice through my knowledge of the overt racism that is on open display in the industry.

I mean, it's an oldie but a goodie. Manveer Heir.

Here he is making all the right mouth sounds about "inclusivity"

BioWare developer Manveer Heir challenges colleagues to combat prejudice with video games

BioWare's Heir On Sexism, Racism, Homophobia In Games

Mass Effect developer makes emotional plea to eliminate social injustice in games

And here he is just being a fucking anti-white racist.

And so it's just impossible to get around that obvious fact that all the mouth sounds he makes about inclusivity are just cover for his visceral hatred of white people. And, IMHO, this is really representative of the industry these days. It's representative of the entire "inclusivity" movement. Every forum I used to frequent that got taken over by the inclusivity police shifts from "Just trying to be inclusive" when they are the minority, to naked visceral hatred of white people when they get enough positions of power in the community.

One of the starkest examples of distinction between these two types of fictional world I can think of is the difference between Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II. DA:O built an interesting and complex fantasy world. In DA2 it seemed to be reduced to a stage on which the player character plays with moral puzzles. But I guess the existance of those Inserters is why DA2 was still well received by the gaming press and on gaming forums, reddit, etc... They just didn't feel or cared about how much poorer the worldbuilding felt.

From the writers' perspective, I would expect professionals who write genre fiction (even if it's "just" writing for videogames) to be mostly in the Immersers camp. Almost all great enduring literary classics in fantasy and sci-fi are more works of worldbuilding than character studies. I don't know if the current state of affairs in videogames is deliberately pandering to Inserters over Immersers or the result of a misunderstanding of what made a hit game. Maybe it's game director/designer interference? Make a world interesting and give the player some ability to influence it and some tough decisions along the way. Then player feedback is that people particularly remembered the hard moral decisions, and so the next installements are nothing but hard moral decisions. It's like a director that has one or two popular "twist" movies and then veers into doing just that.

Now that I think about it, it seems like it's a thing Bioware pretty much always ends up doing with their franchises if given enough time.

Most people are Inserters

"Most" people aren't. Women on average are. Also normies on average are. But that's not "most people".

I'm perfectly happy to describe 80%+ of the entire population (aka a large majority of women plus a sizeable majority of men) as "most people".

80%+ seems sufficient to be described as 'Most'

I also believe that women and normie men are 'People'.

this is why I distinguished in the beginning about old core playerbase demographics being a distinct population. They were a skewed population, where a minority approach to matters had a majority control over marketshare. Within that small population the majority culture was different.

is it really your contention that the best way to decribe "Most People" is to exclude the near entirety of one sex and the majority of the other sex?

Yes, he seems to be experiencing what has happened to many in the past: the Cool Thing went Mainstream.

It's always a wonderful experience when you find a corner of the art world that caters to people that think like you. It opens a realm of discussion, building on other's ideas, and just plain having fun that isn't otherwise possible.

But then the space gets invaded by "normies" and it stops being fun. The same rules that exist in the rest of society get implemented there as well, and the whole game is up.

The only solution I can see is to make things, and to join together with others who like to make similar things. You can't rely on others to do it for you.

I mean look at the furry community. It's full of people who self-taught drawn animation because they wanted animated furry content. Now it's a thriving art scene, and if that makes you go "eww" that's just proof of my point.

You want stories with old-school values? Make them. You want videogames with Nazis and hot women? Make them. You're gonna make the normies say "eww," and the only people who will appreciate what you've made are others like you, but that's okay because those people are who it's for.

And as a final note for all those who say "but I don't have an artistic bone in my body,": you can help in other ways. Anything more complex than a text-only work requires a lot of hands, and even text benefits from editors and the like. Provide funding, organize groups, bring in connections, manage projects, etc etc.

Back then, I don't remember there being any sort of centralized modding sites.

ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/idgames ?

This makes me feel old: these days browsers don't even support FTP.

I use filezilla for ftp. There are a smattering of ancient ftp repositories still out there hosting files that have otherwise totally vanished from the modern web.

It sounds like you were the cultural default for a long time, and enjoyed that.

Now people younger than you and different from you are the cultural default, and you're enjoying that less.

I know how you feel, it happened to me too.

You enjoying one thing less than another makes it feel like the other thing is worse. But be reassured, the people it is catering to like it just as much as you liked the things that were catering to you. Things aren't getting worse, they're just moving on.

Of course, you can believe that 'No, it's the children who are wrong' for as long as you want, it's a valid ego defense mechanism. Don't expect your daughter to thank you for trying to shield her from the culture that she is actually living in, though, any more than we thanked our parents for trying to stop us from playing Doom or listening to rap or w/e.

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Don't expect your daughter to thank you for trying to shield her from the culture that she is actually living in, though, any more than we thanked our parents for trying to stop us from playing Doom or listening to rap or w/e.

Some people grow up to be adults and do thank their parents for the limitations they had as children. My wife is one of them. Her parents stopped her from watching "vulgar" shows like the Simposons, and she still doesn't like those shows.

I had basically no limitations. I had access to the internet, and my parents mostly had no idea what I could get to on there. I don't think I would have appreciated any kinds of limitations.

I do have a sense of self that is separate from the culture I inhabit. I got that by exploring a bunch of culture and realizing that it was not me. My wife got that sense of self by having walls and barriers placed in front of the "bad" parts of culture.

Different approaches work for different personalities. I'd suggest seeing the personalities of your kids and not taking a blanket approach. But things that worked for the parents are probably more likely to work for their kids.

I had basically no limitations. I had access to the internet, and my parents mostly had no idea what I could get to on there. I don't think I would have appreciated any kinds of limitations.

Yep I grew up with the same 'parenting' approach. I regret it every day, and truly wish I had more discipline and was forced to do something other than spend 12-14 hours a day gaming during my youth. It has caused me no end of problems and issues to work around.

I'm glad a lack of limitations worked for you - I'd argue that it's a total abdication of parental responsibility, and while every now and then we get a gem like you cjet, the majority of kids that grow up with no guidance or limitations have an extremely difficult road to climb to become mature adults. @guesswho, I would caution you that it is possible to live in a sick culture. If a culture will teach your child to be weak, to never develop, to stew in anger and blame others constantly for their problems, it is absolutely better in every conceivable way to shield them and instill good values in them.

To be fair to my parents I think they just didn't know. They protected me from the dangers and bad decisions that they knew about. They saw me on the computer all the time and thought "well at least he isn't out doing drugs and drinking like we were at his age, or having sex and risking pregnancy".

I suspect we had similar exposures to the internet, and parents with similar caution towards it. Because my parents were also glad I wasn't out drinking, doing drugs, or getting girls pregnant. Although I'm sure my dad thought it wouldn't hurt if I showed at least a little more interest in girls, as opposed to being so intimidated by them.

On the one hand, the internet in the 90's wasn't as bad as it was now. The social networks you were exposed to were far more fractured, numerous, and heterogenous. I hung around a StarCraft forum, the Battle.net chatroom for it, and an enthusiast forum for Riva 128 users. Because back then a lot of video cards needed some aftermarket attention companies really didn't provide.

The pornography you could find sure was a lot different. It would take 5 nervous minutes of hoping nobody came home and saw me on the family computer slowly downloading a single grainy picture of boobs. It would have taken too many terrifying minutes to print it off to risk getting caught, so the best you could do was commit it to memory for later. If it even finished downloading, because it often froze somewhere between the neck and the row of pixels right above the nipple.

Things today couldn't be more different. Activist run most communities, and love bomb vulnerable people to groom them into deviant lifestyles. Porn seems dominated by bizarre fetishes that I'm unsure even existed back when I was a kid. And parasocial relationships between content creators (adult or otherwise) have horribly stunted the socialization of the people trapped in their orbit. The sort of guy who participates in live camshows used to be universally derided, not necessarily because of the pornographic nature of it, but because of how creepy the unnatural parasocial relationship is. Now everything is a sort of camshow in that creepy way. From the earliest age kids are watching twitch streamers, tipping them to get a rote shoutout.

I just don't think the internet was as habit forming, or interfered with socialization, to the degree it does both now. Nor were the infohazards on it as potent. We tricked each other into going to goatse. We didn't lovebomb the lonely autistic kid into becoming goatse.

I was growing up with the internet in the early 2000's. And I did some objectively sketchy things.

I was in chatrooms sharing pictures with girls my age when we were both underage. Or I was sharing pictures with random old men who just happened to send me pictures of girls back. I don't know, I don't like to think about it too hard.

I joined a political movement that I found and learned about entirely online (libertarianism). I then went and met some of those people in person. That turned out well, but it could have gone worse depending on what movement I found.

I had access to (crappy) video pornography. I'm a little confused why everyone else seems to get into weirder and weirder stuff when they watch porn. I've gone the opposite direction, I mostly just like regular couples having sex. If they are laughing and having fun I enjoy it more. I dodged a bullet there I suppose, but I'm unsure how I dodged it.

I had facebook and myspace in highschool and college. It was prime time for posting things that would later get you fired. I did go back and scrub my facebook at one point, there was one embarrassing picture of a tasteless joke, and an embarrassing post I made about not liking a movie. I scrubbed it almost a decade ago though, and since then I have treated all my online stuff as semi-permanent. Or as semi-possibly something that could be linked to me.

Back before the internet I get the sense that these things just happened offline. Cults have been around a long time, charismatic sociopaths are as old as human society, and sexual degeneracy has a reputation for being one of the oldest professions.

Looks like I predate you a bit more than I thought then. What a difference a few years makes. When I was a kid, it would have been manifestly impossible to send pictures over the internet. I'm not sure widespread consumer digital cameras were even a thing in the 90's. I know my family, and no family I knew, had one in the 90's.

When I was a kid, it would have been manifestly impossible to send pictures over the internet.

In the 90s? GIF came out in 1987, and it wasn't the first graphics format. Consumer digital cameras were a bit later, but scanners were around. Slow and low-res and often not in color, but they existed. There were even high-res color images as far back as the 70s, though you couldn't reasonably create them at home.

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I dodged a bullet there I suppose, but I'm unsure how I dodged it.

Proliferation of porn is probably one of the most underrated social changes... since the invention of the printing press? Repeating firearms? Who knows?

It seems to me that there's a serious disconnect between the popular narrative and the evident reality about porn and its mental impact on the individual. Sexuality seems a whole lot more malleable than people want to admit, with the "weirder and weirder stuff" slippery slope being only one aspect. from the inside, it seems pretty clear that brains have different hooks, specific things snag the hooks and pull the brain toward them. Porn's pure reward stimulus, but the brain's reward demand is so high that even when a piece is actively trying to max out all the sliders, gradients still appear in chaotic and unpredictable ways, and the brain is smart enough to latch on to these and then chase them endlessly. How much is innate propensity and how much is acculturated is probably unknowable, but you can in fact be altered, and even consciously steer the process.

Sure, I won't argue that different people have different personalities and will benefit from different parenting styles.

And if you start from an in-depth examination of your child and their personality and consideration about what is best for them as an individual, maybe you can sometimes correctly find that things I find weird are teh best thing for your kid.

But if your starting point is 'I am on the opposite side of a culture war from the people that make almost all modern culture, so everything they produce must be harmful and I will forbid all of it' then the odds that your decisions will coincidentally coincide with what is actually best for your specific child are very low.

Don't expect your daughter to thank you for trying to shield her from the culture that she is actually living in

One day she'll discover her country hates her. But hopefully she can develop a stable sense of self that isn't totally self-loathing and demoralized by propaganda before that day comes. Because the kids around me I see immersed in "the culture" are not all right.

She will probably not 'discover' that unless her parents guide her into culture war foxhole where believing that is part of the price of admission. That is not in fact the conclusion that the majority of people come to when they are just allowed to explore their culture naturally.

Teen mental health certainly is at a bad point, pandemic is a pretty obvious recent factor and social media plus never going outside seems to account for a lot of it. That's not at all the same thing as the culture war argument being leveled here.

I think your first sentence is mostly true but entirely contingent on the word "she" as opposed to "he". I think that if you took a top-10 of movies and TV from each year you would definitely find at least a few "men suck lol" speeches in each of those lists, in a way that I don't think I've even seen for "whites suck lol" (though of course social media has quite a bit of the latter).

I mean yeah everyone is going to encounter some number of cultural artifacts saying that men suck, that women suck, that white people suck, that black people suck, etc. With varying levels of directness and specificity.

That's one artist showing one perspective in one piece of art, not evidence that 'your country hates you'.

I think you would in fact have a much harder time finding "blacks suck" and "women suck" speeches; the rate's not zero, but in big-budget productions you will find those exclusively portrayed negatively (either in the mouth of a villain, or explicitly retracted by end of episode).

The two live-action Western 2022 things I've seen are Wednesday and The Batman. Wednesday has at least one time when the eponymous heroine accuses someone of "mansplaining" (despite how weird that word sounds coming out of the generally-old-fashioned Wednesday's mouth) and this is presented as correct (IIRC there are other examples of "men suck" in there, but it's been 9 months and I don't think I watched the whole thing); The Batman has Catwoman lay into Batman for his "privilege", although I forget exactly which attributes she picked on out of rich/white/male (Catwoman is black in that film), and we're clearly supposed to agree with her.

Now, technically I did watch one other 2022 Western thing in the form of one episode of Rick & Morty. But 2/3 chosen at complete random is enough for me to start seeing a pattern.

That's one artist showing one perspective in one piece of art, not evidence that 'your country hates you'.

You've landed quite a large number of borderline comments into the mod queue lately, and I think the pattern I would describe them as following is "low effort. In this case, the "low effort" approach is "contradicting people without bringing anything valuable to the conversation." Essentially, a slightly more eloquent "nuh uh!" This is a way of making low-effort points (even when you put effort into the word count).

On one hand, there's probably some value in interrogating the idea that a large number of people are "out to get you," individually. But "this is just one instance" is an especially frustrating form of low-effort objection, since every concrete example anyone can give is always just "one instance." But concrete examples are every bit as important a form of evidence as aggregated statistics (at least arguably, concrete examples may often be better evidence, despite what anyone rhetorically says about "anecdata").

You've also made some good posts in your brief time here so I don't want to discourage those! But being offhandedly or insultingly dismissive of the claims others make is not really something we allow here.

I think there's a big distinction between the actual culture of today's youth and the one being pushed by over-correcting revanchist millenials. The super woke media is not the DOOM or rap music of this era, it's its complete opposite. It's what today's kids' parents would prefer they like instead of what they actually like. I'm not fully understanding what the majority of kids actually like these days, they're quite secretive and tend to share around in small groups online instead of in the public square, but sometimes I get glimpses of it and it's very much not what the OP is complaining about. They don't like it either.

Nobody was advertising Doom or rap to children, or if they did it was with the faintest of plausible deniabiltiy. Whenever there was some media firestorm over kids consuming 'inappropriate' content, the creators would perfunctorily gesture towards the ESRB rating system or parental advisory labels. The culture of days old was hidden from your parents, not championed as good medicine by media and its authority figures (official or otherwise). You hid the M-rated game from your Mom, and you didn't pop Eminem into your parents' car stereo on the way home from your school. If the opposite was the case, other families thought it was strange if they found out. There was - for lack of a better word - shame, feigned or otherwise, around letting your kids wildly consume subject matter above their intended age range.

I'm not sure what youth culture is into these days, partly because times do change, partly because it's hard to separate a clear signal from all the 'modern audience' astroturfing. But I find it hard to believe that the current environment - laid on thick by a PMC class of 30-somethings and older, still steeped in yesteryear's cultural battles - is a genuine, undistorted expression of the real thing. You had to overcome some barriers to reach the naturally-alluring experience of shotgunning demons to bloody ribbons in your favorite heavy metal album cover. Who today has to seek out or hide away woke content, as opposed to having it dumptrucked into their mouth by Disney or similar?

FWIW this comes across as quite condescending. You're so sure you're right you don't to actually provide any evidence of it, or even an argument.

It sounds like you were the cultural default for a long time, and enjoyed that.

I do not believe this is the attitude you adopt when culture goes against you; it seems much more likely that it is a script you apply to other peoples' concerns, not your own. That is not a charitable or productive way to approach discussing these issues.

Of course, you can believe that 'No, it's the children who are wrong' for as long as you want, it's a valid ego defense mechanism.

Alternatively, some things actually are bad, and demand action to limit the harm they cause.

Don't expect your daughter to thank you for trying to shield her from the culture that she is actually living in, though, any more than we thanked our parents for trying to stop us from playing Doom or listening to rap or w/e.

I thank my parents for attempting to protect me from malign cultural influences, and believe that my life would have been significantly improved if they'd done a better job. Maybe my child will not feel this way. On the other hand, maybe my child will decide to be a junkie. I cannot control their decisions, but their ability to make meaningful decisions evolves slowly over time. All I can do is to try to raise them well and teach them to be wise.

I will admit, it's certainly amusing to see someone break out the dusty old "all media is totally fine, stop being a square" argument. Because of course media has no effect on our beliefs and actions, right? Anyone who cares about representation or diversity on the positive end, or racism or sexism or or heteronormativity or any of the million other problematic issues raised against media over the last decade was just a lame-o stick in the mud, right?

I think we are all prone to nostalgia bias as we age, and move out of the prime time as it were. But we also want to avoid philosophical relativism, the idea that there can be no privileging of anything because everyone has their own view.

I think there's always been a lot of crap, and pop culture has generic things that appeal to different generations. For youth, it's enough probably that it's their thing, and not their parents. That it's new.

But I still think you can make good arguments that politics and creativity usually don't go together. Because a lot of woke decisioning is political it's probably deteriorating the artistic product. Famous authors have been critiqued for introducing too much of a political slant in this or that novel and there's some consensus that these works are qualitatively 'less-good' as a result.

I agree with some of this and disagree with other parts.

But we also want to avoid philosophical relativism,

Certainly we should never decide that we are just too out of touch to understand modern culture and can't meaningfully critique it any more; I don't mean to give that impression.

But when someone says 'I won't let my kid watch anything made after the 90s because it's all corrupted by socjust lunacy' or w/e, that's a pretty strong signal to me that they're not carefully considering each piece of media on its own merits and forming a reasoned critique. It looks like just being mad about the culture in general moving on from what was familiar and comfortable to you, which is what I was calling out.

Honest critical analysis is always important, but it's also always in danger of being biased by other influences, and you always have to be on guard against that bias. I'm trying to point out what I think is a pretty likely bias affecting this particular judgement that everything after the 90s is dangerous or bad.

But I still think you can make good arguments that politics and creativity usually don't go together.

I think the word 'politics' is ambiguous in a way that makes this point hard to talk about.

Certainly the two-party campaign-focused culture-war version of 'politics' is such a powerful influence that it can corrupt or derail any other messages that it is paired with. Note that I don't think that means you can't make good art motivated by that type of politics - I like West Wing, I like Rambo - but when you are trying to make art that's about something else but still let that type of politics influence it, it's easy for the politics to overwhelm your actual message.

But there's also the much broader understanding of politics form the phrase 'the personal is political' and so forth.

Whether the women in a piece of art are actual characters or sexy lamps is very much a core part of the artistic message, but it's also influenced by cultural and political trends that made one type of media more likely to get made or more appealing to audiences. An artist might legitimately be interested or uninterested in depicting non-heteronormative relationships or exploring minority cultures in their work, but politics and culture will influence how the audience reacts to those depictions.

This is my real objection to and point about OP"s post. It seems to come from a common perspective that, any time there's a gay character or more than one minority character in something aimed at wide audiences, any time something aimed at younger audiences acknowledges non-heteronormative relationships or flaws in the American justice system, any time a woman character exhibits the same power fantasies that male characters normally get or rescue themselves instead of waiting helplessly, this is obviously only due to the influence of political activists corrupting the culture and ruining the media.

And I think that's just wrong. Certain specific cases of it are that, for sure, but you can't paint with such a broad brush. More often, it's simply that the culture had 'straight white guy protagonist and the world reacting to him' movies and shows and games for a lot of decades (or centuries), and has simply gotten bored with that, realized that the actual world is more complex and interesting than that, and decided to move on to exploring more topics.

(not that we've even stopped featuring that story in tons of media, we're just adding additional elements and looking at new things too)

I agree with a lot of what you say. There's obviously a range of material from good to bad put out in any particular generation, a lot of it I'd suggest is pretty shit. But also gems.

Agreed also that most forms of art are molded by the societal norms of the time, as they act on the film makers/ producers and audience at large, and as those individuals interact/ react against those norms, while also being more or less aware of them.

These norms will include the politics of the time (the negotiation of norms), whether that be issues politics along tribal lines or political in the manner of 'the personal is political', which is a truism in the sense that a political act has to be done by an individual, who always acts 'personally'.

For example, an author may put specific political polemic into the mouth of their interlocutor, or they may seed their version of the norms in a more subtle but equally intentional way, therefore acting politically-- in addition to their other creative acts. Nothing precludes subconscious molding by social norms either, this is the sea we all swim in, but I'd argue this isn't the case for political acts, which seem to me to have a conscious intention by definition, operating at the level of polemical belief, in that politics involves a certain forcefulness, or righteousness.

I think it's this intentionality that gets at the root of why, beyond a certain threshold, it deteriorates the quality of the work down an exponential decay into the zone of 'forced', 'contrived', 'preachy' etc. While we can be a mindless milieu, we can also have a fine ear for being told what to do or think. This is most evidenced by the general reaction to most advice, which has an element of actual resentfulness.

This element of 'too much', or 'against the grain' will vary with each individual, so there does have to be a defense of why this should be more than just taste, pitching reactionary responses against early adopters of the political message or culture shift.

Or to frame it as another commenter, isn't this just the culturally new coming into being? With the usual railing against the wind kind of response?

This feels to me like a familiar relativistic slight of hand, along the lines of 'global warming is a hoax', temperature has always been changing. To find out if things are qualitatively different in the creative merit of a particular artistic work, or a trend in the production of them, we need to do some kind of analysis against some objective marker. An individual can have a sense of it, I would argue, but to prove it's not just taste, they have to demonstrate it somehow, with reference to the works themselves and a rubric.

But in this task we will quickly be flung into dealing with philosophical assumptions. If we were to adopt a relativistic stance, it would be quite hard to measure any differences over time, because there is no measure sufficiently privileged over its material, or it's own substrate, for it to be able to do the job. In contrast, if we adopt an aesthetic stance, we may be able to get somewhere, though it doesn't seem easy to bridge to the definitive answer on the matter.

I think, at the level of metaphysics, we come up against something like Judith Butler's problem. In her case, What is the space--that is Us--that allows for us to perform against the norms, despite being subject to them? Where does it come from and how does it resolve existentially?

If the performance is 'naturally adopted', then where then really was the subjection, or what is the extra element that allows for it? And if subjection rules, how is the reaction able to pass up and out and reconcile the existential split of being the subject and the performer against subjection? This is all just wank at this point- but I think it's something analogous to the current question of how we are molded by culture, which also arises from us as a collective, in this case problematizing the conception of 'right adopted' v 'wrong reactionary', or 'inevitable adoption' v 'railing against the wind', because there's some extra ingredient needed beyond just being washed over by culture, or reacting against? Is there the possibility we can definitely privilege a stance or are we stuck in an arbitrariness?

I think one could easily argue for the objective merits of yesteryear. That did not preclude the new generation from consuming the new stuff more. You can give some objective measure of why that stuff is worse, but it doesn't matter at all to those who consume it more. This repeats all the way back to whatever time you want.

Entertainment always has a form molded by those who make it. You can argue that the form we now see, with regards to 'woke' stuff and politics in media, is worse than something else. It's designed by committee, it's politically motivated, whatever. What people seem to be failing to see is that the point made by @guesswho encompasses all of that.

The people who mold media today are doing so because of the conditions they find themselves in today, just like the people who molded media back in the day were. And that's the funny thing about this whole thing. You could not be were you are today if the people you are complaining about were not excellent at what they were doing. You are the product of the exact same political media you complain about. You are being left behind just like every other cultural conservative got left behind. You support every single step of that process up until the point where you find yourself replaced.

Yes, I largely agree with you. I know I am a tiny agent in a hugely complex network that periodically consolidates into swarms. I would say that because I can stand outside with perspective taking, I am not entirely the product of political media, though as you say that may make no difference as I'm replaced.

I've also sometimes fashioned an argument that media is qualitatively different in the level at which PR operates. I'm no scholar of it but my understanding of the 70s, 80s say was that foreign affairs/state Dept issues was entirely the realm of govt propaganda, distributed through the major media networks. But that there was still a mainstream concept, and application of, mainstream investigative journalism and a framing that understood the concept of balanced reporting. Obviously that may have been cynically applied at outlets for various political reasons. And the political things didn't extend as much into the personal domain as they do now. While it was perpetuating other myths, US exceptionalism etc, it also had a recognisable civic function. I'm not a US citizen so don't have as much a handle on it.

The problem that you allude to initially that culture is shaped as the zeitgeist of the times, is that it is question begging, or ambivalent about the problem of agency. I mean it's also manifest in the way that you say, but the question of whether we can influence it as individuals is high-stakes.

I may have misunderstood you though so just take it as a rant...

Another response to the op in case you're interested-https://www.themotte.org/post/667/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/138982?context=8#context

This comment makes an excellent point and the poor quality of replies and downvotes are telling of that.

"Old man yelling at clouds amirite? Afraid of change much?" is neither interesting or novel. Everybody here has heard it, nobody is ever persuaded by it. As somebody else mentioned in response, it's highly likely that tune would change if the OP (or anybody who says something so insipid) felt their ox was getting gored.

Your follow-up post is better than goodguy's.

Persuaded of what? I don't understand this disposition towards the topic.

People complain about the state of media and entertainment. It is pointed out to them that everything they have tacitly or fully supported for the last decades is the cause of their woes. They proceed to stick their head in the sand so their worldview can remain safe and sound whilst everything they held dear gets whisked away in a BIPOC LGBTQI+ friendly reiteration. Where every element of the creative process sees what you cared about as being a symptom of a problem that needs solving.

You can not have what once was because of what now is. The culture you like is dying a demographic death. You will never get it back. The final nail in its coffin being the culture makers themselves. Instead of writing a 'good' story, they write inserts that compliment modern victimary discourse. They do this because that is the dominant culture. It's the dominant culture because of the culture that came before it.

Once you start tracing the thread of the modern moral fabric back to its source you don't find what you are looking for, you find everything that the modern moral fabric has conditioned you to reject. Which is what a lot of people do, which makes their complaints sound extremely hollow.

Your first paragraph is the interesting bit. That many people who are negative on these newly-dominant strains of our culture may have inadvertently paved its way previously - and enjoyed the ride up until they didn't - is a thought I have reflected on a fair bit recently. I myself am torn between renouncing some of my previous sensibilities or arguing for their selective defense in contrast to 'wokeness'.

That's a neat thread to pull on, and also nowhere in goodguy's post, and so I am not sure what compels you to defend it against downvotes. It's like you're reading a superior argument they did not actually make, and then using that as an opportunity to dunk on some ignorant detractors for reasons I don't fully understand.

Where do you see the poor quality replies? WhiningCoil's is a bit short but he makes his point with supporting examples, The-WideningGyre is perhaps a bit low effort, but your's seems to be at about the same level.

It absolutely does not make an excellent point. Check history: if it's not darwin2500 it's his identical twin. The account alternates between manipulative negging and dogmatic consensus enforcement.

Which is irrelevant to the fact that they made an excellent point here that wasn't properly addressed.

Perusing Based Mods

I'm confused, is there some special browser I'm supposed to use to see this?

Silly thought: the based mods are using the wrong approach. You need to launder your political preferences through accepted victim groups.

To get the gay out, just call it a muslim friendly mod. Now the owners of Nexus have to choose to ban muslims, or keep banning the anti-gay stuff. For extra bonus points, try and make some of the anti-gay muslim nations aware of these games enough to ban them (and then the company will do the work for you and create the mod, like they did with spiderman).

To white wash the game, just call it a monument to the Ukrainian people. Put in some Ukraine flags, give everyone Ukrainian names, and make them all white. Then give options in the mod to switch out the flag, and to switch out the names.

More serious thought: this is all very tiresome. I always feel this way when I see politics intruding into hobby spaces. I very much blame the Woke for starting this fight within gaming specifically. I can't help but feel it was also their single largest strategic blunder (not that I think anyone is pushing a high level strategy for either side). It was probably the single greatest red-pilling of American youth. They created Trump's youth base. Or maybe this kind of fight was just destined to happen. If you believe the culture is rotten and you want to change it, then eventually you are going to find yourself in conflict with the people who enjoy the culture as it currently exists. I feel some sense of cosmic justice that in return for messing with the hobby I love they created their worst enemy.

My future goals:

I have slowly been volunteering to help out more organizations in my life. I've been a moderator on here for years. I'm on the board for a non-profit recreational sport in my area. I'm on the Parent-Teach-Association for my daughter's school. I do feel that the previous generation failed me. They neglected these side aspects of public and social life, and left them wide open to capture by leftists with an agenda.

I will generally be pushing a line of non-politics. As well as trying to be helpful. I do believe that most volunteer organizations will easily follow the incentive gradient. They will do whatever is easiest, and whatever their members are willing to do. I just intend to be a roadblock that makes the incentive gradient flow towards non-politics. If I was involved with Nexus mods, I would have advised them to take a non-politics approach. Let things happen on your platform, and only get involved in the legal stuff. If anyone makes a push for you to get involved, say "sorry, but we don't have the resources to deal with such and such, we are trying to make this a great platform"

The recreational sports league I'm in had a bit of drama recently. Some of you might have followed along in the Wednesday wellness threads. The situation has mostly resolved itself at this point. But one of the board members now wants to put in place a code of conduct agreement to our mailing list. I'll be fighting to change the "code of conduct" thing to basically be a waiver of liability for what our members say/do. And my simplest argument will be: none of you want to enforce a code of conduct.

Children's Culture:

My wife and I have a lot of discussions about what we'll expose our daughter to, and we've more or less decided the cut off is the 90's just to be safe. There were still normal shows, books or games that generally depicted normal cis hetero white families like ours positively. To subject her to modern media feels like child abuse. To the 90's it is.

I have two daughters myself. I do watch the content they consume. Most of it for toddlers has seemed to not have gay themes. Peppa pig is whimsical and nonsensical. Paw Patrol is full of action, and a bit of silliness. Daniel Tiger's neighborhood seems entirely composed of nuclear families. Bluey tends to stay away from politics, even though it is clearly made in mind with the parents watching alongside their kids. I might have missed things in any of these shows, but if I'm missing the things, I think my daughters are missing them too.

I've lately had my daughters singing along with me to a song that contains cuss words in it. Usually I feel weird when I hear cusswords in a song and I'll skip it rather than dealing with the discomfort. Looking back, that was probably unnecessary. There is a very clear "shit" in the song, and my oldest daughter just says the word "chick" instead, because "shit" is not in her vocabulary so she just latched onto the closest word she knew. The song is of course: Rich Men North of Richmond.

Peppa pig is whimsical and nonsensical.

Daddy pig is portrayed as a doofus sufficiently consistently that both my wife and I found Peppa Pig problematic. We can't stop our kids watching it, but we don't seek it out for them.

Or the crypto-racism of having every evil or stupid character look like me, and every cool, heroic and most importantly moral character look like a Gen Z Nonbinary Zirboss.

Being a bit of a devil's advocate here, but I can't help but see this as validating the other side's concerns about representation. One of the main defenses against culture being remade was that the old one was serving everyone just fine; that black kids were identifying just fine with a white Little Mermaid. Of course, there's an obvious over-representation of diversity now, but after how many decades of under-representation? The thinking here, which I can't agree with, is that dragging our faces in it for a while is necessary for straight cis whites to learn not to do this again. But your reaction seems to be exactly what they're going for and is likely to embolden them; your unease is the mirror of the one they claim every non straight cis white has felt for decades before they established institutional and cultural dominance.

I understand what you're saying, but I think that OP's point is that it means a different thing when the woke do it, as opposed to when us anti-woke folk. This is because the woke have stated exactly what it means to them, that they do think that this sort of representation can have a negative influence. So it speaks to them trying to have negative influence on certain people, that they hate white men, and they're not just trying to bring other people up through positive influence.

Like pretty much every point the left has, there's a genuine underlying issue that they identify: a kernel of truth, and then it has been exaggerated and distorted and taken way too far.

Representation matters a little. You should have a reasonable diversity of characters in different roles in different media. People should be able to identify with different characters that share characteristics with them other than just skin color. But not every single film has to have a rainbow cornucopia matching every single distinct subset. Every character in Mulan is Chinese (or a Hun), because it takes place in ancient China. Most characters in Peter Pan are English, because it's a story from England/Scotland. A lot of characters in Disney's Princess and The Frog are black, because it's set in New Orleans. A lot of American TV shows have a large diversity of characters interacting, because there's a lot of diversity in America. As long as all of these things exist, you will see both heroes and villains of each race. You will see bullies and victims and romantic love interests and weak cowards and loyal friends and scheming backstabbers, and lots of different people slotted into those roles. That doesn't require that every single piece of media have every single race in every single role. In some films the bad guys might be black and the good guys might be white. In some it might be the other way around. The point being: anyone can be anything, you are the arbiter of your own fate. As long as Hollywood does not converge all around the same consistent patterns such that one race is always slotted into a particular role, in which case children will pick up on those patterns and form those stereotypes. The left is right that this is bad. The left is wrong that doing it in the opposite direction to how it was in the distant past is good.

We already solved this problem. How many decades of under-representation, you ask? I turn the question, how many decades did we have it solved for? I don't know that every single issue was completely hammered out, but the 90s and early 2000s seemed reasonably fine to me. My generation grew up with healthy diversity and colorblindness on TV, and then we threw it away to punish our ancestors. The 50s were 70 years ago, who are you trying to teach "not to do this again"? Kids today are just going to learn that race and gender and identity categories are super important and you need to treat people differently according to their category and stereotypes, they're not unlearning stereotypes from the 50s because they didn't grow up in the 50s. They have no decades of learned racist baggage to unlearn because they haven't been alive for decades. They're learning the racism they're being fed on TV right now.

I agree. I think the 80s, 90s and early 2000s had struck a good balance of representation though colorblindness. But that's what I'm not seeing in OP's post: commitment to the colorblind (or gay/trans-blindness? we need a better term) principle.

To show that this over-representation is unnecessary you need to commit to judging cultural products on the merit of their content and not the color of the skin or the sexuality of people in it. It doesn't mean you HAVE to watch race-swapping remakes: most of them ARE bad on their merit because the point was the race-swapping/race-baiting, not creating a lasting cultural artefact. But if you pre-commit to reject them out of hand you are telling them that representation is a battleground, a zero-sum game and that you intent to fight them for it; that's not likely to produce a truce in the culture war.

They don't want a truce, and they don't see the necessity of one since they think (and not without reason) that they can sweep the board utterly. Before you can even think about truce, you have to win a bunch of battles.

colorblind (or gay/trans-blindness? we need a better term)

I'd argue that given the symbolism of the rainbow flag, "colorblind" works fine.

But if you pre-commit to reject them out of hand you are telling them that representation is a battleground, a zero-sum game and that you intent to fight them for it; that's not likely to produce a truce in the culture war.

I mean, sure, that's their take on it and the frame that they insist on using, but that's not generally the intent. The intent is "Orwellian editing is morally wrong and we will fight you if you do it". There's much, much less of this pushback against new properties that "represent" than there is against retconning established ones.

Kids today are just going to learn that race and gender and identity categories are super important and you need to treat people differently according to their category and stereotypes

I just read an article where the UC system dropped 75% of faculty applicants for insufficient DEI commitment. Apparently it was a huge demerit to agree with the idea, "I try to treat everyone the same." It's not just kids today, it's being burned into institutions intentionally.

Being a bit of a devil's advocate here, but I can't help but see this as validating the other side's concerns about representation.

That's the thing... If it's so harmful, why do it at all? Is this about justice and fairness? Or is it about revenge...


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