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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 2, 2023

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The right wing should do patronage of good culture and right wing culture and abandon an ethos of disengagement and libertarian ethos.

Why?

Because if you know artists, they care first and foremost about doing their things and getting money and recognition. The reason the left has been so successful its because it is willing to provide support, and to deprive them for not aligning with them.

Secondly, people who are actually on your side will also act based on incentives.

And thirdly, because the end result is desirable. A culture of just whining, about leftist cultural output is impotent. There is nothing wrong with complaining about what is bad, but you should also promote what is good. We need a society that promotes good art and and good culture. There is more to life than line going up. And if you don't try to fill that vacuum, someone else will.

What this means effectively? A right wing goverment should defund leftist artists and promote rightist artists and allow people to join the side. Soon you will discover that many artists are actually rightists who were afraid to express themselves.

It also means promoting art programs.

Also some kind of art tends to be of a more negative and leftist form like rap and modern art. Not all but more commonly.

Beyond the goverment, right wingers and not leftists should care more about networking to promote art that isn't left wing. It doesn't have to be explicitly political. Lord of the Rings for example qualifies. Just accurate adaptation of great classics of western literature without left wing ideological blinders would also qualify.

Putting regulations in place to make them illegal or underpromote far left racebending art and make them less financially viable, and giving incentives for art that respects the source material for example.

Of course, someone could object to a certain particularly aggressive moves in terms of what you promote and not promote, and in being excessively far to the right and excessively intolerant. And I could even agree with them in some cases.

However, in the current status quo, things are so lopsized in the direction of the left that it is pushing the culture landscape in a more pluralistic phase to have less race bending far left culture being promoted and more right wing.

This means that more right wing patronage of art is good even from a more neutral, pluralistic standpoint. Which is a general pattern of the culture war, even outside art. If someone is fine with leftist domination and escalation then a position in favor of an impotent disengaged right makes sense. We don't have a sufficiently neutral and moderate status quo though for defence of the status quo to be the neutral position.

Beyond the goverment, right wingers and not leftists should care more about networking to promote art that isn't left wing. It doesn't have to be explicitly political. Lord of the Rings for example qualifies. Just accurate adaptation of great classics of western literature without left wing ideological blinders would also qualify.

More focus on this part. I feel like trying to invest in rightist media creation is overlooking the low-hanging fruit of just getting people to consume existing media that more closely aligns to rightist values.

You don't even have to go full trad and RETVRN to the classical Western canon. If the right could get people to watch the original Star Trek and Star Wars instead of their new woke installments, show their children Don Bluth and Studio Ghibli instead of the latest Disney/Pixar movie with a gay couple, or read Robert Heinlein and Jerry Pournelle instead of whatever prog nonsense won the Hugo award last year, that would already be a huge improvement.

For example, the Mormons already ban R-rated movies. Would it be such a stretch for the prophet to say "no movies made after the year 2000"?

https://reasonabletheology.org/cs-lewis-on-reading-old-books/

The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.

https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/hQSaMafoizBSa3gFR/eutopia-is-scary

Movies that were made in say the 40s or 50s, seem much more alien—to me—than modern movies allegedly set hundreds of years in the future, or in different universes. Watch a movie from 1950 and you may see a man slapping a woman. Doesn’t happen a lot in Lord of the Rings, does it?

https://blog.reaction.la/economics/fertility-and-corporal-punishment/

From 1945 to 1963, wives in movies and on television are sometimes spanked and it is routine, respectable, and usual. For example in “I love Lucy” we are never shown a spanking on screen, but Lucy is regularly very afraid of receiving a well deserved spanking for her many amusing misdeeds.

In the Western “McLintock” the authority figure, representing virtue, middle class respectability, and normality, unambiguously endorses the husband beating the wife severely for gross misbehavior, with a small coal shovel.

From 1945 to 1963, appropriate and proportionate corporal punishment of wives is depicted as normal, proper, appropriate, expected, and respectable. As in McLintock, it is what respectable middle class husbands do ensure that their wives and families behave in a respectably middle class manner – since women, unless restrained, have a not at all middle class preference for drama.

To be fair, I don't think the original Star Wars or Star Trek are rightist. More the later fits more with the left.

From 1945 to 1963, wives in movies and on television are sometimes spanked and it is routine, respectable, and usual. For example in “I love Lucy” we are never shown a spanking on screen, but Lucy is regularly very afraid of receiving a well deserved spanking for her many amusing misdeeds.

In the Western “McLintock” the authority figure, representing virtue, middle class respectability, and normality, unambiguously endorses the husband beating the wife severely for gross misbehavior, with a small coal shovel.

From 1945 to 1963, appropriate and proportionate corporal punishment of wives is depicted as normal, proper, appropriate, expected, and respectable. As in McLintock, it is what respectable middle class husbands do ensure that their wives and families behave in a respectably middle class manner – since women, unless restrained, have a not at all middle class preference for drama.

Yes. The idea of no right wing themes and films/shows even in the more left wing film and tv industries is nonsense. There is a reason that the left has been complaining about past tv shows and films. They changed it by design to the current ideological perspective and things can change again.

For example, the Mormons already ban R-rated movies. Would it be such a stretch for the prophet to say "no movies made after the year 2000"?

It does seem that at certain point in the 2010s films and tv shows made in American industry went into a bigger left wing turn. Implicitly I follow this rule to an extend myself. I avoid watching most recent stuff and prefer older films and shows. There are more of them than someone can see in a lifetime unless they do nothing else than watching movies, so you still got a lot of options than you can choose. Being made prior to 2010s is a positive indication that you are going to get less of the cultural leftism than if you picked from the 2010s and later.

Like why not watch I Claudius instead of black tudor queen stories? Or the Japanese masterpiece Ran?

Or Ikiru which does have some conservative themes too. The protagonist finds no fulfillment in pursuing hedonism in his quest to find the meaning of (his) life.

Still, most people for the same reason that they became fat, that they follow the IseeIeat diet, are not going to do this even if they are doing things more than before due to the fact that there has been a quality in old art including music that isn't found equally today. So it matters we get new content made. It also matters because there are more worthy stories to be said.

Also, with bad remakes and sequels being made that are a net negative in the world and we should be better off without them it becomes harder for people to find the original superior material.

To be fair, I don't think the original Star Wars or Star Trek are rightist. More the later fits more with the left.

Trek was always openly and notoriously leftist. Original Trilogy Star Wars was non-leftist in a way which makes it an "old book" for the purposes we are talking about here. The snarky way of explaining this is at the level of aesthetics - the Empire was (according to Lucas, explicitly) modelled on the Soviet Union and the scene in A New Hope that is notoriously plagiarised from Triumph of the Will was the final scene where Leia gives Luke a medal while LARPing as the lawful government of the Galactic Republic. The First Order is modelled on Nazi Germany and all the scenes in The Farce Awakens which are redolent of Triumph of the Will are all First Order rallies. Meanwhile the goodies call themselves "The Resistance" and LARP as a real resistance even though they appear to be irregular forces of an actually-extant, non-LARP restored Galactic Republic. The serious way requires a level of expertise in media criticism that I don't possess. The best statement of the argument original trilogy (and prequel) Star Wars is right wing is the one made by David Brin, who thinks this is a bad thing.

To be fair, I don't think the original Star Wars or Star Trek are rightist. More the later fits more with the left.

Trek was always openly and notoriously leftist.

OG Stark Trek was explicitly anti-racist, but it was anti-racist in that colorblind, equality-of-opportunity way that is considered thoroughly and unacceptably right-wing today. You don't hear anybody on The Original Series mention microaggressions or privilege or affirmative action. The narrative doesn't hate white people the way so many modern narratives clearly do.

Other forms of leftism are notably absent. The economic leftism of The Next Generation is nowhere to be seen; Kirk talks about Scotty's pay in "The Doomsday Machine" and human merchants like Cyrano Jones exist. There is some feminism in putting women on a warship, but at least Kirk is allowed to act like a fucking man instead of a cuck. When he seduces the 19-year-old Lenore (played by a 21-year-old Barbara Anderson) in "The Conscience of the King", nobody talks about how problematic and creepy it is for a powerful older man like Kirk to hit on a college-aged girl; it's just normal.

(Of course, it would be even better if Karidian told Kirk to back the fuck off unless he was willing to put a ring on Lenore and insisted on chaperoning their dates, but again you don't have to go full trad to improve on the current situation)

Where can you easily find/access this older media? I'd imagine the majority of the reason people don't consume it is because it's much harder to seek out. Max has been pruning their selection of old movies, even. And they're seemingly the only streaming service that cares to have a lot of classics.

Yes, this is definitely part of the problem. Media comes out, stays on the shelf for a decade or two, and then vanishes, never to be seen again until its 95 years are up (if any copies even survive that long). Only a few works avoid this fate; super popular movies that are always in demand, like Jaws, or books that capture the attention of teachers and get assigned year after year to unwilling students, like To Kill a Mockingbird.

I have a theory that the REAL reason for perpetual rabid copyright expansion (of which Canada is the latest victim) is because the Cathedral doesn't want new woke media to have competition from older works.

I have a theory that the REAL reason for perpetual rabid copyright expansion (of which Canada is the latest victim) is because the Cathedral doesn't want new woke media to have competition from older works.

Eh, I'd argue it's more because creating new media better suits the capitalistic endless growth model. The more new things you have, the more products and markets you can sell, the bigger you can make numbers. That makes the alien god we have summoned and call 'market capitalism' happy with us.