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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   35347 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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The future Liberals want by Noah Smith on substack. It’s not that interesting a vision really: the future of the West is highly diverse, urban, self-expressive (trans accepting), and abundant with oh thanks an olive branch for conservatives.

I think the bizarre thing about this is that Noah — as woke, neolib as it comes — felt the need to write this at all. Everyone knows this is the vision; it’s all we hear about! Conservatives all know that this is what is on offer if society remains on autopilot towards the future too.

What strikes me about it is a vision of total anomie and dissolving of any sense of common culture and this is supposed to be good. Each nations singular (or maybe 2-3 tops) religion replaced by anything or nothing. Each national ethnic group replaced by a multicultural hodge podge with inclusion and acceptance for all. Diversity of income (inequality). Imagine there are no countries…

I can’t help wonder what families are supposed to be like in this vision — or indeed if they really exist. Is a world of radical self invention fuelled by technology compatible at all with human flourishing as its always been known: freedom to choose the burdens we bear for maximum meaning. What if blank slatism wasn’t a description of the world, but a challenge!

It just all seems so ugly. Most people have poor taste so radical self invention will be mostly just ugliness like architecture ripped from its patrimony and place. If politics ultimately springs from aesthetics, this liberalism is eventually doomed (but not before it wins and destroys what little of left of pre-modern life).

That’s just life in cities. Always has been like that. Come hang out in the city and you’ll find yourself shoulder to shoulder with 13 different ethnicities, and Socrates and his gang of kids will come bother you about why you follow the weird old traditions. At least if you’re in a city where people are pulled to want to come to, that’s how it goes.

I don’t really think there’s anything new here.

Reading this, i had a shiver along my spine, imagining the role that my people and country would have in this liberal utopia:

A people deprived of its mythos and ancestries in the name of building an inclusive future, where all our two millennia-old symbols and texts are modified in order to accomodate other people that share nothing with us.

Supported and put together only by a foreign ideology that had no presence here until the end of the nineties, and completely alien to our political tradition, and where dissenting against it (probably for purely self-interested reasons, being a nation and all of that) can make you fall in the enemy camp, represented by the non-liberal ideology or culture of the day, that is probably way nearer and similar to our culture than the Washington D.C dream.

All of this in exchange of...

Absolute self-expression, that is the thing the we do not have and made us way more saner and healthier than the anglosaxons

And good urbanism... oh, we have that.

The cherry on the top is that we are supposed to reach this marvelous future not as the metropole that absorb capital and resources and bright people, but as the peripherical nation that had 30 years of stagnation and decline, and that is approaching other decades of stagnation and decline, while receiving only the poorest and less fit of the people of the third world.

Yeah, this is hell for us, not the future.

while receiving only the poorest and less fit of the people of the third world.

Yup... "model immigrants" are classed as "white adjacent" in this so called oppression hierarchy. We will have to see if the US becomes less attractive as an immigration zone in the future.

the future of the West is highly diverse, urban, self-expressive (trans accepting), and abundant

I can’t help wonder what families are supposed to be like in this vision

Presumably much like they always were, but with a bit more openly gay or mixed race. The charitable view of this future is largely positive. Things like families would still exist.

As an atheist in mixed race marriage, the thought of a future America with no common religion and an ethnic hodgepodge sounds good to me. Though I would like some civic nationalism and recognize the dangers of anomie.

From the article

Many people believe that a nation belongs to its “founding stock” — to people descended, or at least racially similar, to its founders. Liberal nationalism rejects this idea, and consciously tries to transfer ownership of the nation’s culture, institutions, and national mythology to a more diverse set of inheritors.

What am I supposed to do with this? Should I call out Smith as a white supremacist conspiracy theorist?

Haha, its that * -1. Classic celebration parallax: you can acknowledge it only if you celebrate it. If you hate it, it's not happening.

Is your point that he's mistaken about how many people believe the nation is inherited along racial lines?

Poster's point is that Smith is explicitly advocating a "great replacement".

It just all seems so ugly.

On that note, I couldn't get passed his bit on Lizzo and the crystal flute. Everything about an obese woman in a skinsuit twerking with an American historical artifact seems like such a ridiculous parody of repulsive decadence that I literally cannot understand casting this as a form of "inclusive nationalism". This looks so clearly like triumphant mockery of the downfall of America's heritage that I'm baffled at an apparently sincere view of this as a Good Thing.

Despite how predictable the culture war coverage of this performance was, I actually don't find it that difficult to imagine an alternate reality in which something like this is enjoyed by conservatives, and criticized by progressives. I mean, declaring "History is freaking cool, you guys!" doesn't exactly feel like the same sentiment as "History should make you uncomfortable," does it? If the most important thing for everyone to remember about James Madison was his role as a colonizer and enslaver, why distract from that by focusing on the trivia that he also enjoyed playing music, and having that cultural common ground with him?

Was that really twerking, though? The clips I saw at least were reasonable flute playing (certainly not to the level of Lindsay Sterling).

Looks like it, at least kind of.

I googled the Lizzo and thing and all the top articles have one of "racists," "racism," or "dogwhistle" in the headline. My inner conspiracy theorists wonders if these are written before the event even happens and then auto-posted the day after. Or maybe even GPT'd.

So this really happened, it's not a parody thing?

Okay, two points: (1) I had no idea this woman could actually play any instrument, all I knew of her so far was that she is a fat rapper? singer? who does lots of 'sexy' photoshoots, so good job there, pleasantly surprised (2) who the heck thought that letting her do a performance with a crystal flute was a good idea? Suppose she dropped it? This is not something you can just go "oops" about.

I have no idea what the point of all this was; if it's for the historical musical instruments lot to show that they are "down with the kids", I don't think any Lizzo fans are going to be inspired to visit the museum. For her, I guess it's some sort of free publicity? No idea.

Although I have now learned that there is such a thing as a historical crystal flute so there is that, I guess 😁

To be fair, this is a respectable skill level, albeit not exactly virtuoso, and at least moderately professional in attire. I doubt any average Joe doing the same would get the same opportunity, but it's not the parody, either.

There's a risk of damage, but there's a pretty serious risk in anything happening ever. And playing a flute isn't exactly art restoration when it comes to likelihood of risk.

That's the performance I saw, at the museum itself. That she is able to play that instrument was a pleasant surprise, I had no idea she had that much ability at all. I still don't think letting her play it onstage was a good idea, with all the best will in the world, her hands get sweaty under the lights, her grip slips, and oops. A very expensive pile of sweeping up.

The historical musical instruments lot are probably woke enough to think ‘having an obese black woman twerk with their priceless(literally) historical artifact’ is a good in itself.

I still don’t know what’s woke about twerking, but it’s apparently important.

Oh, I couldn't tell you. First, I had no idea what twerking was. Then, I saw online outrage about white women twerking and this was cultural appropriation and they shouldn't do it. Now, She-Hulk (who is a white actress) has twerked in an episode where she's doing her lawyer job and she's doing this in her office, but all glass panels so you can see, with a client (played by someone called Megan Thee Stallion, again a name I don't recognise). So now it's okay for white women to twerk?

I have no idea, the last dance that was culturally relevant to my age and experience was punk rock pogoing (not that I ever pogoed myself, you understand).

I think the point of the whole thing is supposed to be something like 'fat black women doing overtly sexual stuff is high culture now, disapproving of & criticizing this is low-status'

Twerking especially is to be understood as a cultural phenomenon akin to (and aesthetically equal to) ballet or opera.

Seems woke to me.

I guess you're also of the opinion that The Beatles violated the Budokan?

There's actually a really fun (or !!fun!!) set of philosophical questions, here, when it comes to the sacred and the profane.

As an example... have you ever heard the Johnny Cash song Hurt? It's fairly well-regarded -- not unusual to see in top fifty of all-times list -- but if you've not, it's worth listening to. It's a haunting song of depression, self-destruction, and mistaken choices that still can bring a tear to my eye; while I'm not especially attached to the genre, the singer takes the genre to the limits of its emotional range. Shelly's Ozymandias put to song, in a way, and made more impactful by how its framing interacts with the mortality of the leads and even its setting: the singer and his wife, who feature heavily in the music video, were already in poor health at the time of recording, and died not long after, while the abandoned Johnny Cash museum that they perform in would burn to the ground EDIT: would get turned into offices and a cafe within the decade, and the singer's mansion would burn down a few years after the song's release.

I don't have much interaction with the sacred, but that's pretty close, for me.

There's many other versions, as one might expect for such a popular song, and while some feel very much like they're using the song rather than treating it respectfully -- Rick and Morty used it as a season finale closer, in the same sense that Shrek used 'Hallelujah' -- perhaps the best-known is the Nine Inch Nails version. It's not bad, from a genre and technical sense... but it feels profane, compared to the Cash version. Part of that's a matter of context: a seventy-year-old Cash's needles aren't the same as a thirty- or forty-year-old Trent Reznor's. Some of that's just that the gimmicks Reznor's video uses (an atomic bomb, a decaying animal played in reverse) happened to become dated where Cash's didn't.

But the overarcing piece is just so heavily opposed to the themes of the Cash version that it's jarring. Cash's version starts slow and gradually builds across the entire piece to its final crescendo, before the inevitable fading conclusion. NIN clamors cymbals throughout points, sometimes interrupting or overriding the lyrics and the rise and fade of action. Razor used the song as an opener, and the music video (and at least some radio cuts) end in applause.

There are two lyrical differences: Cash focuses on "the pain" and wears a biblical "crown of thorns", NIN focuses on "my pain" and dresses its lead in "a crown of shit". Cash's song is a ruler mourning the rampage of time and unavoidable mistake across an empire that no longer even remembers its once-master, resigned that even could the man regain his station, that he can not help but hurt those who still care for him with his own death. Reznor's vocals are angry, a drug addict searching for the next high, driving away everyone he once loved, moaning all the time about those hurts and knowing errors, offering and threatening anything for that next rush. It's not that the Reznor version is wrong, but it's coming to a deep subject without the earnest seriousness you'd expect or hope.

Of course, Cash's cover came seven years after Reznor's original.

/needle scratch/

That's an extreme example. Reznor thought Cash made the song more of his own than NIN had, and Reznor had hesitated to allow the cover precisely because it was so close to Reznor's heart. But I have no doubt that there are people that think of NIN's message as Sacred in the way I react to Cash's -- someone's pain being driven by addiction and hubris and anger makes it no less real.

((Presumably, someone that likes The Magician's.))

I'm sure, as well, that there are versions that go the other direction : Christian or 'Christian'-themed songs that only took a serious effort at resonating with virtue when put into other framework (Cohen's 'Hallelujah' was actually popularized by John Cale... and Shrek), and I expect the majority of Sacred works are more sacred in their original tellings to their original audiences than the shoddy repackagings.

Which is a long story to say that this feeling exists, and it doesn't necessarily mean we've got to respect it... (and even argues against, to some extent)

But there's an awkward bit, there. We have decided that we're going to respect some sacred matters. Indeed, there's a pretty sizable list: socons might mock them as 'hurt feelings', but whatever you call it, there's a wide variety of discomforts where we allow massive social force and, in many jurisdictions, employment impact and direct legal impact. Yet it's hard to have this conversation without mentioning Serrano: it's not just that the profane must be allowed, but that it must be accepted and the state actively funds it and its shallow pretenses. Or to contrast varying responses to different sorts of public statue iconoclasm.

I don't know that this should fit in this category. It's very easy, as socons point out, once offense is a tool, to make being offended your core. I don't think a lot of the people raising objections about this care about flutes, or twerking, or the Library of Congress. The closest parallels I can think of -- protests being photoshopped least they offend politicians and children, at the risk of repeating myself, the outrage over the McDonald's meals at the White House -- aren't quite the same.

But this dismissal seems like a failure to engage with the problem. The Beatles did their Budokan show in 1966. Nevermind that most people here don't know anything about traditional Japanese martial arts competitions, or that the venue did get transformed into a music hall and pro-wrestling show house; none of us know this Sacred nature, if it exists, and very few people here would be old enough to have been exposed to it even had we been born in immediately-post-WWII-era Japan.

Thanks for introducing me to a whole bunch of things I'd not previously been aware of. I hope your won't mind a small correction: if I have understood Wikipedia correctly, it was Cash's private mansion that burned down, while the House of Cash was turned into offices and a cafe.

Ah, thank you. Corrected.

I used to think that things like flags and symbols were silly and pointless but I now realize that they are extremely important touchstones for revealing people's true dispositions

How did the Japanese feel about it at the time?

I am not repulsed by the Beatles.

I sort of alluded to it with this comment, but I think the problem with Noah's idea is that...well, it's still not enough. Shiny, cozy cities sure do sound nice and all, but it's just not Promethean enough, IMO. Where's all the mega-arcologies powered by underground fusion reactors? Where's the space elevators guarded by semi-autonomous rocket-plane-mechs? Where's the space colonies?

If you're going to propose a radical vision for the future that doesn't end in the options of AI Panopticon, Radical Environmentalist Degrowth, or Planet Riyadh, you need to go bigger than those--bigger than the planet, arguably.

Put another way, the most attractive presentation of American liberalism that I know is Star Trek: The Next Generation. Not radicalism, not Marxism, but FDR/JFK/apple pie and patriotism liberalism. (Less overtly, the same spirit is also made attractive in Carl Sagan's Cosmos.) Without agreeing with that vision, I can still admire it, and share some of its ambitions, including the Promethean values in TNG that help it to appeal across the political spectrum. Perhaps significantly, Gene Roddenberry (and maybe Carl Sagan) was the type who could at least recognise the value in different visions of the world, even if he thought that American liberalism was superior.

As I see it, the distinctive spirit of American liberalism is self-actualization. Tolerance, multiculturalism etc. are valuable not so much in themselves, but insofar as they enable people to pursue their higher and often idiosyncratic goals. Moderated by a stronger concern for negative freedom and/or tradition, self-actualization is also something that is important in American libertarianism and American conservativism, so there is a lot of room for cohesion among these value systems. That's why both liberal visions like TNG and conservative 80s action movies can appeal across the mainstream US political spectrum. And something like the Rocky series has cross-political appeal, even though there is a lot of political/philosophical themes where there could be controversies: the films have themes that are bound by a self-actualizing vision of "Do it yourself, for yourself, by sorting yourself and your relationships out" that almost all Americans enjoy.

The problem is that many cultures of the world do not share this vision, and the idea that you can have American liberalism among any cultural group is an item of faith rather than knowledge.

(Incidentally, I'm not American. View this as an alien's interpretation of your culture.)

Perhaps significantly, Gene Roddenberry (and maybe Carl Sagan) was the type who could at least recognise the value in different visions of the world, even if he thought that American liberalism was superior.

Interestingly, that would probably get Star Trek and TNG cancelled today. Here's a fun exchange from Star Trek:

LINCOLN: What a charming negress. Oh, forgive me, my dear. I know in my time some used that term as a description of property.

UHURA: But why should I object to that term, sir? You see, in our century we've learned not to fear words.

KIRK: May I present our communications officer, Lieutenant Uhura.

LINCOLN: The foolishness of my century had me apologising where no offense was given.

KIRK: We've each learned to be delighted with what we are. The Vulcans learned that centuries before we did.

Remember that episode when Riker hooked up with a transwoman, but then her planet made her do conversion therapy? The federation didn't use centralized corporations/control of the financial system to punish them or anything. Just an explicit anti-colonialist statement from Picard that they need to be allowed to do their thing.

Similarly for the eugenics planet, although they did grant asylum to a few.

It's also not the utopia that everyone remembers, or at least not everywhere. Earth is nice but one crew member is a former drug addict from Space Baltimore.

Yes, I think a lot of the appeal of TNG is that it was a utopia that still recognised that there was room for moral complexity even in a future utopia. TOS had the same virtue. I think it suggests that American liberal culture was less prone to authoritarianism then. After all, college-educated American liberal TV writers of that period would have encountered conservative professors, and would have read about how things were done differently in other times and cultures, like the Native Americans or the Ancient Greeks/Romans. Reading about cultures for which you have sympathy and yet which you recognise as genuine (and perhaps even attractive) alternatives to your own culture is a great preparation for thinking seriously about philosophical issues. In short, they had what used to be the referant of a "liberal education".

Original Trek is very clear that humanity is a work in progress, that it took a lot of wars and violent history on our part to get us to adopt "live and let live", and sometimes people backslide. Interestingly, in a couple of episodes, there's also the suggestion that we need a certain amount of trouble and strife to be truly human, that we need to work hard to reach the ideals we're aiming for, and that too much peace and prosperity is bad for us (usually the result of mind-controlled populations on planets where, with the best intentions, they let AI run their society).

From the episode "The Return of the Archons", where an ancient AI has been controlling the population in the name of a perfect society, under the programming put into it centuries ago by its dead creator:

LANDRU: The good is the harmonious continuation of the Body. The good is peace, tranquillity. The good of the Body is the directive.

…KIRK: What have you done to do justice to the full potential of every individual of the Body?

LANDRU: Insufficient data.

KIRK: Without freedom of choice, there is no creativity. Without creativity, there is no life. The body dies. The fault is yours.

...LANDRU: Peace, order, and tranquillity are maintained. The body lives, but I reserve creativity to me.

...SPOCK: Then the body dies. Creativity is necessary for the health of the Body.

(Kirk talks the AI into destroying itself)

…Captain's log, stardate 3158.7 The Enterprise is preparing to leave Beta Three in Star system C One Eleven. Sociologist Lindstrom is remaining behind with a party of experts who will help restore the planet's culture to a human form.

…UHURA: Captain, Mister Lindstrom from the surface.

KIRK: Yes, Lindstrom.

LINDSTROM: I just wanted to say goodbye, Captain.

KIRK: How's it going?

LINDSTROM: Couldn't be better. Already this morning, we've had half a dozen domestic quarrels and two genuine knock-down drag-outs. It may not be paradise, but it's certainly human.

KIRK: Sounds most promising. Good luck.

SPOCK: How often mankind has wished for a world as peaceful and secure as the one Landru provided.

KIRK: Yes. And we never got it. Just lucky, I guess.

Also Star Trek handles Worf's character strangely. He is a Klingon raised on Earth by human parents. Yet he is intensely obsessed with ancient Klingon rituals even beyond what the Klingons themselves are. Yet somewhere ostensibly there could highschool/college football with Worf and I think that would make for an amazing spinoff movie.

It's weird that he is never seen to celebrate Christmas or human holidays despite human stepparents living in 2170 Russia. And apparently as an adult he is still on good terms with them. It's always weird how removed Worf is from human culture.

Almost like an oversight on culture versus genetics.

I think Worf's ultra-devotion to Klingon culture is understandable; he may be raised on Earth by human parents, but he's not even part-human himself. He sticks out in every way (and this is echoed in B'Elanna Torres who may be half-human but, as visibly Klingon, also is an outsider) and so his foster-parents probably tried their best to include his native culture in how they raised him.

So he's over-reacting, he's as much a Klingon as any born and raised on the home world, and to prove that he's as good as they are, he is going to be The Best Klingon Ever. It's partly the zeal of the convert and partly the kind of radicalisation you see in second- and third-generation immigrants today, where they haven't been raised in their native culture but they still are visibly not part of the mainstream culture around them, so to compensate they discover their roots and are even more traditional than their parents or grandparents.

The "not celebrating Human religious holidays" thing is very Star Trek; Roddenberry's original vision is that humanity would have moved on past religion, and while he accepted and indeed expected that people would celebrate Christmas and Thanksgiving, by the 80s/90s 'political correctness' as it was then called was happening, and having a celebration of (say) Christmas would have been Problematic. It's a Christian religious festival, you see, and showing people standing around a Christmas tree drinking eggnog would have been privileging one tradition over another and claiming that America was a Christian nation (because these shows all take America as the template; when they have an obscure Earth sport played by Vulcans it's baseball, not hurling or kabaddi). Unless you had Worf also celebrating every other religious and secular holiday, that was a non-runner.

I got the strong impression that Worf's foster parents were Jewish, so we could have had him celebrating Hanukkah, but the Space Jews are the Bajorans and that was a later show.

Not sure if this was ever explained, but I interpreted this as a kind of rebellion by Worf - a bit like a second-generation immigrant getting REALLY into their parents' culture, even moreso than their parents. Ironically, this results in Worf living up to ideals that most Klingons do not. That's why Worf is more stereotypically Klingon than many characters who grew up in the Klingon Empire and are frequently dishonourable.

Yeah I get it. But just once I'd like to see Warf as a human. Like a weird love for cheesy philly hoagies. Our ice fishing. Or something just human that he excelled at... jiu jitsu maybe. I would love a Worf origin story. I wouldn't even mind if it went ueber woke.

Is that weird?

Does that make me a xenophobe?

Edit: I want to see Warf: the Origin Story. In theaters soon!

Does that make me a xenophobe?

Maybe just a xenoskeptic:

Alan Partridge: I’ve nothing against them, it’s just, as I see it, God created Adam and Eve. He didn’t create Adam and Steve. I’m kind of a homosceptic.

Prune juice. Soccer, until he accidentally head butted a kid to death.

I'd also definitely watch Worf: Origins. I'd want any wokeness to be "natural" to the plot rather than forced, but "refugee from stereotypically violent/hostile culture turns out to be honorable/awesome person" is kind of a freebie there.

jiu jitsu maybe.

Pretty sure I saw Worf in a kimono several times. The martial art may have been made up though.

I think that was the Klingon version of tai chi that he was doing, and taught Deanna (if I'm remembering correctly).

It was. And more importantly in this context, it was a made-up Klingon martial art, not a human one, though he was teaching it to humans.

I generally like Noah Smith, but not this piece.

It seems he thinks leftist diversity is actually diverse, and while it's obvious in retrospect this was initially quite jarring. My greatest fear of liberalism is that it will in practice turn everything into a samey globalist liberal soup. I'd rather have an archipelago of self-assorted communities, than everything integrated everywhere.

Is a leftist political philosophy more likely to cause this result? Possible evidence against, a westerner that has gone somewhere "exotic" has likely gone somewhere more conservative. Perhaps I'm just pattern matching? Possible evidence for, the left-aligned western culture does seem to have a more quickly evolving memeplex.

Or, maybe the left-right bitching is all smoke and mirrors and really it's the authoritarian/libertarian axis of the political compass we should care about. If that's the case I can do no more than to continue screaming into the void.

My greatest fear of liberalism is that it will in practice turn everything into a samey globalist liberal soup. I'd rather have an archipelago of self-assorted communities, than everything integrated everywhere.

I'm not sure if "liberalism turning everything into a samey globalist liberal soup" is actually a thing. I'm suspicious of it because we hear about it from both the left and right; the left phrases it as capitalism destroying indigenous cultures while the right phrases it as destroying traditional values--it feels like both cannot be true at the same time.

So, is liberalism turning everything into samey globalist soup? (I love this label, by the way). I'm not sure.

Yes, it allows people to cross cultural and geographical boundaries to engage in a similar activity, eg. teens from all over the world can play Call of Duty together. But does that mean they grow detached from the culture that immediately surrounds them? There appear to be specific flavors of camaraderie among gamers of different nationalities. In the same way, people are afraid of "cocacolization", but wherever I've traveled around Europe and the US, I've seen a lot of local flavors, even local coke knockoffs.

Stepping away from my own subjective experience, it looks like, if anything, the world is undergoing fragmentation. Famous SV venture capitalist Paul Graham wrote a little bit about it some years ago. And, if anything, it seems like this process is the fastest and most powerful in the liberal west--people sorting themselves out by beliefs, music, age, interests, lifestyles (eg. monogamy vs polygamy), etc. Which makes sense, because there being no culture-enforcement in the form of a church, a government, or a tradition, people will find values that bind them, creating more diversity instead of less. Actually, thinking about over the last 50-100 years, the period of solidified nationalism, it was the pre-globalist world that looks like samey soup: top down, church/government enforced beliefs and rituals.

it feels like both cannot be true at the same time

‘Indigenous cultures’ are just traditional values that the left decided to care about.

I mean, it’s cultural diversity.

It’s previously been a conservative impulse to destroy indigenous cultures by integrating them into the ‘correct’ belief system (here: the church). This occurred across Europe and N and S America.

Isn’t it conservatives who want people in nations to have one culture and not several?

That sentence also goes the other way- "traditional values" are just indigenous cultures the right decided to care about. Confederate monuments/lost cause of the south are little different from indigenous languages- they're important to older stock in the areas they exist in, a lot of other people don't like having to deal with them, and the main difference is being on opposite sides of the culture war.

Sure, but I think those traditional values are actually the remnants of an older monoculture that was steamrolling everything, and the left was so successful in usurping it that they stumbled into the position of becoming the new monoculture.

It’s always been an awkward position for the left, they’re temperamentally suited to fighting the power structure and so things got weird when they suddenly became it.

Confederate monuments are a good example of traditional values that are not a surviving remnant of a monoculture and which conservatives defend. Barbecue and certain forms of country music can probably also go in this category.

For non-southern examples of the right defending traditional values which are not just remnants of an older monoculture, several states have laws guaranteeing pharmacists the right not to dispense birth control of any kind to protect the religious rights of Catholics, who have never been a majority in this country, and these laws are almost entirely advocated for by the right.

the left phrases it as capitalism destroying indigenous cultures while the right phrases it as destroying traditional values--it feels like both cannot be true at the same time.

Why not? Those are the exact same thing. It's very America-centric to claim that they're not.

Maybe I phrased it poorly. My suspicion is triggered because both the left and the right agree on some version of this.

On the surface, that should lead to an "aha! There must be something true to this!". But given how rarely this happens, it has the opposite effect on me.

Perhaps it's because of horseshoe theory? As in "both the left and right agree that free speech should be curtailed" (huge generalization, just for example) -- that triggers alarms in my head, but not because of the issue at stake, but because of the agreement.

So, is liberalism turning everything into samey globalist soup?

People have felt this way for some time

Before clicking on your link I correctly guessed what it would be.

I guessed this one

https://youtube.com/watch?v=6vTPjuT3rTA

The "vision" makes no allowances for reality.

How about radical environmentalism? Here, I think Thiel is envisioning some sort of mashup of degrowth ideology and over-regulated Eurosclerosis. But when it comes to the major environmental threat we face — climate change — the solution will be the opposite of degrowth. The price of renewable technologies (solar, wind, batteries, and electrolyzers) has come down so far, so fast, that decarbonizing our economy will actually lead to increased profits, increased growth, and abundant energy.

Meanwhile, in Europe and California, they're actually doing the degrowth thing. Shut down the power plants, ban fossil fuel use. Increased profits, increased growth, and abundant energy? No, recession and shortages

Today, however, this attempt at broadening the core American polity has been hotly contested — Hamilton is hated by conservatives, Lizzo’s flute-playing has ignited a culture-war debate, and the 1619 Project is of course wildly controversial. And these divisions have been exploited adroitly by our illiberal enemies, as when Vladimir Putin cynically accuses America of racist colonialism while simultaneously railing against trans people and atheists.

You see? When conservatives oppose the 1619 Project, they're helping Putin.

These urbanists don’t want to turn the whole world into Manhattan, or even Amsterdam. Instead, their visions are of somewhat-built-up suburbs that offer more transit options (trains, buses, e-bikes), are more environmentally friendly, and combine multi-family housing with single-family housing. The person I know who has done the best job of drawing pictures of what this might look like is the architect and artist Alfred Twu:

Ah, yes, their neighborhoods are wonderful visions which offer all thing to all people (except nasty car drivers). But that's all they are, visions. And the nasty car drivers stubbornly refuse to go away.

But now we’re adding a third type, which may be the best of all: densified green suburbs.

And the only qualities they lack is that of existence and possibility. Yes, you can find architects and artists to draw a Utopian vision. But just because you can draw it doesn't mean you can build it.

I believe the answer to all of these can be, and should be, “yes”. But so far the Abundance Agenda is still just a talking point and a collection of op-eds, while no one is really presenting a coherent future vision of either good jobs or entrepreneurship.

To its credit, the "Abundance Agenda" link in the original mentions the National Environmental Policy Act and other regulations. Noah does not; he is too busy blaming conservatives for not getting with the program. He's willing to say empty words in favor of free enterprise, but not to acknowledge that his "liberal democratic future" is in conflict with itself. And it won't be the "Abundance Agenda" that wins.

I don't see why defending bland, generic car based urban sprawl at all makes sense for conservatives. They are soulless, placeless expanses originally envisioned by liberals. The traditional city is walkable, has a strong sense of community, is unique and has a sense of belonging. There needs to be places for people to meet, small businesses and room for local culture. A stroad with endless generic housing with some big box stores selling the same products that can be found on the other side of the planet is essentially the anti thesis to the traditional city. The urbanist walkable city with cafes and restaurants at least has the aesthetic of a real city. My main critic of liberal urbanism is that it focuses purely on the aesthetic and not the function. There is no focus on having a common culture, a sense of belonging, an architectural style unique to the town and its geography etc. It is a disney-world version of a city. I would still much rather have that then the completely atomized suburban sprawl that has been built since WWII. Suburbia has isolated people from their communities, made people fat, ruined the environment and created a boring society. Instead of a public square which is a public space there is a mall which is nothing but a commercial space controlled by someone who has no connection to the town.

Cars are a massive waste of space, force kids to sit in their houses while their mom has to drive them to their friends, and replaces the bakery with bland factory bread. The best thing that could happen to conservatism is 150 dollar per barrel oil.

The traditional city is walkable, has a strong sense of community, is unique and has a sense of belonging. There needs to be places for people to meet, small businesses and room for local culture

The traditional city in one of the cores of global power is also a multicultural hodgepodge. There’s nothing new under the sun.

Cars are a massive waste of space, force kids to sit in their houses while their mom has to drive them to their friends, and replaces the bakery with bland factory bread.

So you're okay with me transporting firearms, ammo, sundry incendiaries, cannon and the (entirely legal!) bulk explosives necessary to feed them on your public transit?

I find it strange as well, but perhaps it's because American conservatism can trace its lineage back to a liberal revolution and its adherents see themselves as carrying on the values of that revolution. The liberal/libertarian elements of the ideology have always struck me as an odd thing to pair with social conservatism, but its followers take them seriously it seems, and in that case perhaps it's no surprise they would opt for the freedom and individualism represented by a car-based society over the sense of community offered in walkable cities. America's immense cultural reach also means that these libertarian tendencies can be exported and influence other conservative movements worldwide.

Wherever we want to go, we go. That's what a ship is, you know. It's not just a keel and hull and a deck and sails. That's what a ship needs. But what a ship is... what the Black Pearl really is... is freedom.

Having one's own means of serious transportation means freedom and autonomy compared to being stuck with muscle power and/or wherever the Powers That Be deign to permit you to go. That is greatly valuable in itself.

And yet that freedom has eroded the very foundations of the community and turned society into an atomized and compartmentalized expanse of boring sameness.

I don't see why defending bland, generic car based urban sprawl at all makes sense for conservatives.

Because cities make people childless even more. Because the real vision of people attacking suburbs is a rich Manhattan with clean streets, while the rest of the riff raff has the right to enjoy unpoliced gang violence in their neighborhood because you aren't allowed to move away to the burbs.

I don't see why defending bland, generic car based urban sprawl at all makes sense for conservatives.

People in cities become collectivists, because people are piled so close together that just about anything you do becomes the business of your neighbors. If you want to go anywhere you're stuck with your 3mph feet on crowded sidewalks or getting piled together on crowded, dirty, and slow government-run (not just government-built) transportation.

The traditional city is walkable, has a strong sense of community, is unique and has a sense of belonging.

The city of reality is not as walkable as advertised (you can walk in your neighborhood but the city is likely too big to walk to downtown or any other neighborhood), and has little sense of community (partially because people move around all the time, partially because it's so big and crowded -- the paradox of being alone in a crowd is a common one) or sense of belonging. Conservatives pine for those things but the places they existed mostly don't exist any more because they require a small number of people in one place for a long time who mostly interact with each other, and that's just not the modern world. Ironically one of the few places you actually can find this is in neighborhoods full of generational welfare recipients; they may be dysfunctional communities but they are communities.

Exactly. Cities make people “oversocialized” (ol’ Ted K was right) and constantly needing to consider other people’s feelings when you pursue your life’s ambitions (or truth for that matter) dulls everything. I had a post back in the old country about spending a few months living rurally and one observation I missed was how much more ideosyncratic, but not neurotic, country folk are. If you want to build a new structure on your land you just need to figure out who will help you with it and whether stuff will fit in your truck. In the city meanwhile you need to grovel to a planning board for years like a peasant. Freedom is good. I wanted to build!

The other thing is that walkable urbanism is only possible for families — I.E. the only important demographic over the long run — if crime and disorder is very low. I’d love to live in a walkable suburb if we tripled the prison population and had absolutely zero tolerance for disorder. But hey, that’s not in the liberal vision.

This is why there's a weird current of pop culture that looks at the Cyberpunk Sci-fi city as utopia. the city where the very vastness has resulted in it becoming a new frontier, the concrete jungle... etc.

The idea you could have all the idiosyncrasy of the country with all the opportunity of the world at your finger tips... because enforcement had broken and no one could be made to care about stepping on their neighbors toes.

.

Its the only "dystopia" that people are actively excited to revisit again and again, or whose style they try to emulate... no one's clamoring for more stories in Oceania... there's no hype train for being able to play in the world of Atlas Shrugged

I don’t know about this.

I see far more families out on the street hanging out and just generally enjoying life in Latin America (where crime is much higher) than I do in the United States. It’s always the top thing I notice traveling between these two.

Latin American streets are full of life. Full of families, tons of children running around, events, gatherings, all manner of activity. US streets are quiet, dead, there’s nobody around, and even just walking around is shunned.

I also noticed that this affects my mental well-being a lot, and it’s the main reason my political persuasion is basically an urbanist in the way Noah describes.

There's things that could confound this: LatAm places have held onto traditional cultural aspects better than NorthAm places; better shared culture between people in the city; nobody ever felt the need to flee the cities (and if they did, they probably just straight-up fled the country instead); and part of the crime rate vs. niceness thing could be you can just shoot someone who makes your life/experience miserable and mostly get away with it.

I don’t think these are great counterpoints as, LatAm is one of the most ethnically diverse places of the world, and it’s definitely true that people structure the cities there based on fleeing from crime.

But there may be something in what you mention about the idea of fleeing cities, in the US, city cores became the crime ridden parts, whereas in LatAm, the outskirts are typically more dangerous and the city center is more clean and well kept.

That’s probably part of it. But in my opinion, car culture is the biggest factor here. Here in the US we went all in on designing everything around the car, and it upended basic communal life in my opinion.

Probably helps that the Mexican government never wages war on the productive classes within the city and never forced the children of the middle-class into the most violent neighborhoods at bayonet point.

America had functional urban life from its founding to the 1960s... then the federal government waged literal war on it

.

edit: this is why Canadian cities consitently remain intact in-spite of everything, even with modern homelessness and drug problems the middle and upper-middle class will still live in "inner suburbs" as few as 100 meters from housing projects or homeless shelters... because they can send their kids to schools, PUBLIC SCHOOLS, where their kids won't be interacting with that and anyone dealing drugs or interrupting class or comitting violence would be removed.

The liberal vision is generally not very good at accommodating itself to the needs of families, so it’s no surprise there.

I had a post back in the old country about spending a few months living rurally and one observation I missed was how much more ideosyncratic, but not neurotic, country folk are.

I agree. Cities seem to foster these weird little hyper-networked monocultures where everyone thinks similarly, acts similarly and just generally behave as if they stepped straight off a conveyor belt, because everyone is absolutely obsessed with what everyone else thinks of them (though it's likely not out of any sense of community, they adopt these beliefs and behaviours because there are incentives to do so). There's also a tendency to self-elevate and to thumb their nose at the poor, uneducated country-dwellers who aren't as liberal and cosmopolitan as they are, though I won't get into that.

Country folk, on the other hand, generally seem much less... Borg-like, in the way they act. It was refreshing, the few times I've been out there. I'm sure there are things that are lacking in rural areas, such as economic development and job opportunities, but there's a vibrancy and genuineness to the people there which you simply do not find in the city. I suppose it's a consequence of not being involved in perpetual status games.

Suburbs have one big advantage, they separate the functional people from the pathological when society stops doing that for them in cities. For most parents that one thing trumps all the advantages of a city.

This is it. I don't care about the "benefits" of living in the local major city. Trash and shit strewn homeless encampments, dirty needles, shit on the sidewalks, comical levels of property crime, did I mention the Hep-A infected shit?

But none of that exists in any suburb that I have lived in. The lack of effective public transportation is an effective filter to all those problems. I have a family to raise, so I live outside of city limits.

I don't see why defending bland, generic car based urban sprawl at all makes sense for conservatives.

The only thing he said about suburbs was that, unlike whatever grand plan Noah has for society, they have the advantage of existing, and being relatively functional. People have every right to demand a successful test run somewhere, before you start redesigning their communities from scratch.

Traditional cities have functioned and existed for millennia and still function and exist with tens of millions of people living in pre car developments across the western world. What hasn't been able to function well is the complete break with tradition after WWII when cities were entirely redesigned and we ended up with long range commuting, massive environmental damage, low social cohesion, extreme blandness and the sheer ugliness of urban sprawl. Looking at what has actually worked and created cities like Barcelona, Budapest, Boston before WWII or Copenhagen is a much better route than continuing with one of the biggest failures of progressivism in the 20th century. Suburbia was a progressive project, and it doesn't make sense for conservatives to take the blame for it.

Those places exist, but not as conservative communities. Cities are consistently the most progressive places in their regions, so it's hard to see them as the way to work out conservative values.

Can you link to an example of your ideal city? Is it working well there?

Can you link to an example of your ideal city?

Singapore.

Is it working well there?

It's doing great! Its public transport is excellent and rates of car ownership are much lower than in America. By metrics like life expectancy and quality of health care, it's one of the best places in the world. It also has an ethnically and religiously diverse population (including a higher proportion of Muslims than any Western city), so objections that it wouldn't work in America because of a lack of cohesion are not valid.

Besides the other comments, Singapore also has a brutally-authoritarian government. Being like Singapore would produce cities that even Conservatives might love to live in, but at a cost that no liberal could ever countenance (namely, beatings and executions).

Singapore's not diverse at all -- there's hardly any blacks or hispanics.

While I am a strong proponent of conservative urbanism, and I wholeheartedly agree with your choice of Singapore as a model example, I think you’re barking up a wrong tree by positing Singapore’s ethnic diversity as a counterpoint to American concerns about racial issues in contemporary urban society.

Yes, Singapore has a variety of different native East Asian and South Asian ethnicities. None of those ethnic groups is remotely close to American blacks in terms of their propensity to crime, their inability to maintain an orderly and peaceful society, or their glowering hostility to other races, constantly threatening to boil over into stochastic interpersonal violence.

When 21st-century Americans complain that cities are too diverse, what they really mean is that there are too many blacks. Full stop. You cannot possibly make sense of discussions of race in America if you interpret the term “diversity” literally and naïvely. Our cities would work just fine if they were 30% white, 30% Asian, and 30% Jewish. This isn’t my optimal society, but it would absolutely be orderly and pleasant.

Actually, I think Malay–Chinese relations in Singapore are an excellent analogy for Black–White relations in America.

Singapore is roughly 15% Malay and 80% Chinese, with the rest being smaller ethnic groups that don't really matter for Malay–Chinese relations. This is very similar to the US a few decades ago: 15% Black, 80% White, with the rest being Asians etc. Malays and Blacks consistently underperform economically relative to the Chinese and to Whites, respectively. Both the US and Singapore had race riots in the 1960s. Since then, the US has had race riots regularly, while Singapore hasn't had any.* Singapore also has extremely low crime rates. I think this demonstrates that improving race relations in America is possible.

What do you think makes Black Americans so much more problematic than Malays?

* Singapore had one relatively small riot in 2013, but this is unrelated to the Malay–Chinese conflict.

More comments

I understand what you're going for, the question is whether you can reproduce that in a modern context.

Suburbia was a progressive project, and it doesn't make sense for conservatives to take the blame for it.

Maybe they just don't want to take the blame for whatever comes next.

I think the thrust of Arjin's criticism here is this: okay, suburbia sucks. Now what? What do you propose to do about suburbia sucking? All the car-centric infrastructure in the US, well, exists. It would presumably cost an astronomical amount to get rid of it, possibly more real or financial resources to rip all of it up than it did to put all of it there in the first place.

The other argument often lobbed at pro-city people (one I don't necessarily agree with, but see as an unavoidable stumbling block) is that cities suck to live in because criminals and other ne'er-do-wells will shit up the place and get away with it. Those same people will point to recent developments as evidence that the city-dwellers making cities worse places to live will never be held accountable for such.

The first step would be to allow densification of existing areas instead of continuing to build more far flung suburbs. At least in my city, property in denser areas is much more expensive than in the suburbs. This means we're building out a bunch of suburbs for people who would rather live in the city but can't because bad land use policies have resulted in a shortage of housing.

I read the article and it is a tour de force in using lots of words to say very little. I suppose it is a bit idealistic (albeit in an utopian way I don't think is plausible), but it is simultaneously lacking any substance. Suburbs with lots of trains and buses? Sure. How? A bus route that serves 3 people a day is a massive waste, and is what subsidized busing in the suburbs actually looks like. Diversity? I see people of races doing things of all sorts, how are you going to overcome fundamental differences? Is it going to be reparations forever? Then say that. Say what you mean, not nothing and lovingly allow your fellow travelers insert their utopian dreams into it.

You do get walkable commuter suburbs in older cities like toronto, montreal, where there's a grid and busses or streetcars just go through every part of the city in a more or less straight line and its really intuitive to just go north or south...

But the thing is you can't control who's entering your neighborhood and everyone walks down every single street to get everywhere.

Toronto has a murder rate of 2 per 100,000 the richest city in America... DC its 16 per 100,000. even with drug problems and homeless people etc, wealthy proffessionals are fine living in "Inner Suburbs" of cities like toronto, because even though you get crazies shouting down your street at 2am... the police will respond to noise complaints and it probably won't escalate beyond that.

To have the same security in the US you either need to build your city in the most hostile manner to exclude anyone who doesn't own a car, or you'd need ruthless public or private security enforcement... that either puts people away a long time, or is violent enough in the immediate enforcement they don't come back.

Even in Canada with a 1-2% black population there are endless stories of how "disproportionate" police enforcement on the black population is... in the US? with 13% of the population being black? you can have hostile unwalkable suburbs, "White flight", or what would look like and open race war to keep those cities livable for professionals with kids.

I noticed he also skipped over explaining how his dream city wouldn't be a techno-panopticon hellscape. Except unlike the Chinese one with the totalitarian AI censorship presumably focused entirely against people who complain about all the used needles and shit in the streets, or who ask each other in hushed voices why their children's kindergarten Diversity lessons have to involve so many penises.

Indeed, how does his vision deal with any of the maladies that modern suburbs were created to workaround?

Or people who oppose the mandatory monthly jabs required to live in the city.

I think the bizarre thing about this is that Noah — as woke, neolib as it comes — felt the need to write this at all. Everyone knows this is the vision; it’s all we hear about! Conservatives all know that this is what is on offer if society remains on autopilot towards the future too.

He's not woke. He's a neoliberal or democrat who's good at courting low level controversy and clickbait. The society he envisions is already here except there will even more division. America's enduring success is sorta like the Drake equation...America may be far from perfect, but it gets the key things right.

It just all seems so ugly. Most people have poor taste so radical self invention will be mostly just ugliness like architecture ripped from its patrimony and place. If politics ultimately springs from aesthetics, this liberalism is eventually doomed (but not before it wins and destroys what little of left of pre-modern life).

I've wondered whether I should make some kind of post about why neoliberal (so to speak) visions are so ugly. Like when the Soviets or Nazis dreamed big they dreamed a perfect world, where people were strong and brave and smart and beautiful. (nevermind the pile of corpses just out of frame)

But then you compare that with whatever the hell this is. This was a Green poster for the most recent German election. Forget about whether or not it's feasible. Their idea of a utopia is just ugly (and never mind all the weird elements that frankly make it look like a far-right parody of what a liberal would want)

Liberals at the moment seem very bad at articulating what kind of a world they want to create. More and more I wish the Soviet Union hadn't fallen; we've just gotten so pathetically complacent without a rival ideology

I've wondered whether I should make some kind of post about why neoliberal (so to speak) visions are so ugly. Like when the Soviets or Nazis dreamed big they dreamed a perfect world, where people were strong and brave and smart and beautiful. (nevermind the pile of corpses just out of frame

I've heard it proposed (don't offhand remember where) that present-day architecture is deliberately ugly because humanity has forfeit its right to beauty with the Holocaust. That is: aesthetics themselves have been discredited.

Evil people proposed beautiful dreams in the past, and we mustn't be like them! So everything we make is going to be ugly!

I can't remember who said it, but there was the quote about poetry being vulgar post-Holocaust.

There's also the progressive aesthetic that ugly is actually beautiful

I think the ugliness is a consequence of the implicit belief in the blank slate that underlies so many current progressive beliefs. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, of course, but what if the judgment of every beholder is determined almost entirely by their oppressive social programming? Surely the only reason some things are considered beautiful and some aren't is the oppressive patriarchy programming our judgment that way. In order to break free from that, we must radically challenge that by celebrating things that the patriarchy considers ugly. We can deem them by fiat to be beautiful, just like how the cis white supremacist patriarchy deemed them by fiat to be ugly. There's little room to appeal to beauty when you believe that all judgments of beauty are merely instantiations of oppressive brainwashing.

I wish to point out that while the German greens in general are indeed increasingly crazy, their far-reaching popular, institutional and media support nonwithstanding, this particular poster is specifically targeted at the wokest quarter of the wokest city in the woke country of Germany and not, or at least not yet, representative of the party and its supporters as a whole.

More generally, I don't think these kinds of short-termist progressives - liberals in your parlance - really have a coherent vision of a world they wish to bring into being. They have a catalogue of good and bad things, and when they wish to depict their utopia they simply cram a bunch of the good ones into a picture and call it a day because that's literally all they have the tools for.

Conservatives have a natural aesthetic advantage here - the world they idealize, or at least one close it, has actually existed and can be displayed as it was.

I'm curious why you describe the idea of utopia depicted in the poster as "ugly." The poster itself is not aesthetically pleasing -- the color scheme is pretty awful -- but is the scene it depicts any uglier than, say, this one?

I also don't get your claim that "Liberals at the moment seem very bad at articulating what kind of a world they want to create" -- doesn’t the poster do just that? It apparently does clearly enough for you to opine that said world is "ugly."

This coy "woah, what do you have against antifa graffiti, I honestly don't understand bro, just asking questions" trolling is a really obnoxious habit. And it doesn't even accomplish anything except reinforce people's suspicions.

Is it just a reflex?

but is the scene it depicts any uglier than, say, this one?

Yes. Very much so. Like comparing a classical painting and photos of a burn victim.

Part of the ugliness comes from the fact that none of the people depicted are what would be considered conventionally attractive in the western world.

Yeah, I'd call it uglier. The scene in the painting looks mundane, not pretty but simply normal because it depicts a real situation in a real place, realistically. The scene in the poster is an illustration of an imaginary ideological utopia, so ugly that it needs to be stylicized in order to avoid reactions of disgust.

Again, I am not sure what it is that is depicted there that is disgust-inducing. Disgust is an awfully strong emotion, after all. And, the OP used the term "ugly" -- I took that as an aesthetic comment, rather than as a synonym for disgust, but perhaps that is indeed what they meant. I can certainly understand if someone found certain elements of the scene objectionable, such as the Antifa reference. Or even the LGBT-adjacent couple. But the overall scene of people going about their day -- walking the dog, flying a kite, going to work, hanging out with friends, etc, is a pretty regular street scene.

Again, I took the OP to be saying something other than "I disagree with the Greens' political vision," but perhaps that is indeed all they were saying.

The art style is ugly, and I've noticed it online a lot recently, this particular sort of graphic design for progressive-type issues. Part of it is how they draw body hair - they can't do facial hair, they do these tiny black lines which don't look real. One I saw recently tried to show 'real women come in all shapes and sizes, smash patriarchy beauty standards' messaging by having a woman with visible arm hair - and if you know a woman with hairy arms, or are a woman with hairy arms yourself, you know this is not how arm hair looks. The style is just ugly, and they are so eager to show "smash the gender binary, smash patriarchy beauty standards, challenge the normies" that they do these fat, tattooed, ugly people (and I'm fat and ugly myself, before anyone leaps in with "who are you to talk?")

They don't have to do supermodel thin waifs, but jeepers, can they at least draw plump women and men who look like humans, and not with tattoos, piercings, undercuts, and Visibly Queer And Differently Abled all over them? 'yes, we can't just have a guy carrying his young child with him as he goes shopping, Dad must be drawn to look gender fluid, maybe even trans, and preferably a different colour to the kid'.

EDIT: I did like the gardener woman on the delivery bike, so that was one thing in its favour. A normal person going about their job. I won't comment on the tattooed woman in a very old-fashioned wheelchair in the middle of the road trying to walk her dog on a lead with one hand while she wheels herself with the other, because think about it for one minute: imagine wheeling a wheelchair one-sided, and how that would wobble all over the place, and then imagine that in the middle of a road with bikes, pedestrians, and what-not. Yeah, that works just fine and no accidents at all will ever happen!

As I mentioned, I am not a particular fan of that style either, but I don't think it particularly unique to progressives; I see it fairly often, and it seems to me to reflect contemporary Asian influences. As for the hair, it isn't supposed to look perfectly "real," any more than the hair on people in many illustrations in the 1920s looked perfectly real. Finally, I am not sure what you are referring to re facial hair - the father's beard is not tiny black lines. Do you mean the stubble on the person on the right? How else does an artist depict stubble in a minimalist way?

Finally, of course, this is a political poster. It is not meant to be a great work of art. It is meant to get people to vote for the party (and, indeed, the Greens gained 51 seats in that election )

Regardless of whether it is stubble or an incomplete pubescent beard, it clearly works: No one doubts that it is some sort of sparse facial hair. Honestly, the OP seems to be picking nits. I mean, I suppose one could criticize this as just a bunch of blobs of color, but that misses the point of what art is; ultimately, it is about fooling the eye, and indeed at a small enough scale, even a photorealistic painting is composed of tiny blobs of color, just as a digital image is made up of pixels.

Those are contradictory statements; a sufficiently-bad campaign poster would work against the campaign. It doesn't need to be the Sistine Chapel, but it has to have some artistic value to be of any value at all.

I don't know why so many people here work so hard to create strawmen. I said that it is irrelevant that it is not "a great work of art" not that it is irrelevant that if no artistic value at all.

the father's beard is not tiny black lines

Look at the facial hair on the man/woman who is hanging off the blind pink-haired with blue lipstick black woman.

Yes, I mentioned that: " Do you mean the stubble on the person on the right? How else does an artist depict stubble in a minimalist way?"

Are wheelchairs wobbly? I'd imagine that engineering would have eliminated virtually all the flimsiness out of even the folding kind.

It's the same principle as rowing a boat on one side only: if you don't switch the paddle stroke from side-to-side, you'll end up going in circles.

It can be done, but you need to practice, and in reality that woman would be constantly swapping the dog's lead from one hand to the other to do the zig-zag wheeling as here.

Note that the gardener woman is fat, dark-skinned, and the gardening company she works at is Turkish by name. There's a lot of signalling going on even there.

Yes, it is a political advertisement in a country in which people of Turkish descent make up a substantial (and probably electorally relevant) portion of the population. And, no surprise, the Green Party in Germany advocates for their rights, and indeed a Turkish-German was named leader of the party as far back as 2008. So, the "signaling" is simply a statement of the party's political position.

Well, yes. I do not disagree with any of these observations; I merely pointed it out.

The numerous graffiti imply decay, a lack of maintenance, and general dysfunction. If the picture were less cartoony and more realistic, that street would probably be filled with rubbish and the buildings and roads would be in a state of disrepair. I don't like tattoos or piercings – I think they are invariably ugly – but that's just my subjective personal preference, whereas a city that is falling apart is objectively bad from any sane perspective.

Well, I guess we have a different idea of what "numerous" means, and if you infer "general dysfunction" from a scene in which there a bunch of children playing, people going to work or walking their dogs,etc, well, I think that is on you.

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you infer "general dysfunction" from a scene in which there a bunch of children playing, people going to work or walking their dogs,etc

It looks like a slum area, and that is not meant disrespectfully. It's that kind of old-time, high-density city living, where people did live in tenements and so all your business was done in the street and the road - hanging out washing across the street, kids playing in the road, people sitting on boxes kissing, etc. Inner city life in the big cities, the archetypal image of New York with people sitting on the steps up to the apartment buildings that we know from TV and the movies, or the mill towns of the English midlands, the rows of terraced houses or the poorer back-to-back ones.

So I think that is what is driving a lot of the response to this poster - it's giving off signals to us of "crowded, poverty-stricken, life in tenements" along with the graffiti etc. and not "exciting urban life with diversity and gentrified spaces". Because to make those apartments liveable, the neighbourhood needs to have been gentrified so the organic-farming, gender queer, LGBT+, Muslima BIPOC kite-flying wheelchair users aren't living in squalor.

Well, I guess we have a different idea of what "numerous" means

The ground-floor walls are completely filled with graffiti. There literally couldn't be any more! There's even some underneath the greenery on the wall behind the kissing couple, implying it's been there, with no one cleaning it up, for enough time to let the plant cover the wall – a few years, at least. (After writing this paragraph, I realised it was just pointless nitpicking. Feel free to ignore it.)

if you infer "general dysfunction" from a scene in which there a bunch of children playing, people going to work or walking their dogs,etc, well, I think that is on you.

You can easily find photos of children playing football in Brazilian favelas. People go about their lives, even if they live in horrible slums. That doesn't mean it's incorrect to describe slums, and the social and political system that produced them, as dysfunctional.

If you want to look at the picture purely as an abstract piece of visual art, divorced from its context and implications, then fine, it can get away as being merely not pretty. But visualizing the scene and its constituent elements with some degree of fidelity should present an image that requires some ideological or at least aesthetic buy-in for the viewer not to be repulsed. See some of its elements:

  • Cripples

  • Fat people

  • Squatters

  • Graffiti

  • Transsexuals

  • Piercings

  • Tattoos

  • Antifa

  • Stoners

  • BLM

And I don't mean this as a jab against these categories, but I do mean to observe that someone who is not already inured to their sight would almost certainly feel some level of disgust were he to encounter their average representatives. Certainly those who are already on board will imagine more presentable examples instead, or idealized versions, and the poster is almost certainly simply an in-group signal aimed at them in the first place.

To rephrase: All of the elements enumerated above are, if not categorically then at least with most of their real-world examples, fit to cause disgust, and ugliness is merely description of the visual qualities that lead to the more visceral reaction in the viewer.

To be even clearer: Crippled limbs are ugly. Rolls of fat are ugly. Squats are, most of the time, ugly. Graffiti is ugly. Transsexuals are ugly. Piercings are, if not ugly in themselves, viscerally disgusting. Tattooed people are ugly. Antifa tends to be fairly ugly. Stoners often become ugly. BLM activities tend to be ugly. Yeah, there are probably counterexamples, but I'd wager they're rarer than those examples that prove my point. And yes, ugliness is subjective, so I posit some neutral human observer who sees any of these things for the very first time and has never heard of them before.

Half the items on that list are not end goals, but (to them) necessary intermediate steps before tech or progress finds a better solution. Barring extreme identitarians, most fat/disabled/trans people wish they weren't and would like to change their situation. Antifa/BLM/squatters would similarly (I think) claim to not want to exist in an ideal world.

The rest are preferences. Would you agree that there is at least some contention over the aesthetic value of piercings/tattoos/graffiti/drugs? It's not like there's no precedent for them in human civilization.

Half the items on that list are not end goals, but (to them) necessary intermediate steps before tech or progress finds a better solution. Barring extreme identitarians, most fat/disabled/trans people wish they weren't and would like to change their situation. Antifa/BLM/squatters would similarly (I think) claim to not want to exist in an ideal world.

Fair point, but the poster isn't selling the fixed and patched utopia 1.0, it's selling a slightly idealized vision of Berlin, but with more leftists and degeneracy.

The rest are preferences. Would you agree that there is at least some contention over the aesthetic value of piercings/tattoos/graffiti/drugs? It's not like there's no precedent for them in human civilization.

Yes, of course. I realize my argument is very subjective here, and will seem weak, but I do maintain that sticking metal into your body or having someone permanently paint you via needles or doing nonstandard drugs or painting other people's walls against their will are all at least slightly disgusting if you've never seen or heard of them before.

Really? People will feel disgust at encountering a disabled person? Not empathy?

You of course, are not the OP, but it seems to me that the Green position on these matters is that disabled people, nor any of those other types of people, are not inherently ugly. So, if that is the basis of the claim that the scene depicted is ugly, then that answers my question: That calling the scene "ugly" is just another way of saying "I disagree with the political positions espoused." Which is fine; like I said, I thought the OP was making a different type of claim.

The disgust is what makes the empathy sincere. It is no great love to love the beautiful, the abled, the pleasant; that is natural, and all people love them. But love the leper -- disgusting, oozing, broken, repulsive, dangerous? Well, now that's a shining soul.

The crippled are innately worse people. They are crippled. Those who rise above their limitation through hard work and grit warrant a certain respect, but for the most part, the broken are gross. Being hovered over by a super autist is uncomfortable. Watching a kid with a Downy stroke-face flip his shit is uncomfortable. Seeing some strung-out junkie piss himself on a bus arouses disgust.

If you can't acknowledge that the dregs of society are in fact viscerally repulsive, then tolerating them is no sign of virtue. Of course you tolerate them. They're fine, apparently!

The crippled are innately worse people. They are crippled

And I have not said otherwise. OP's claim was completely different: " someone who is not already inured to their sight would almost certainly feel some level of disgust were he to encounter their average representatives." In other words, that the normal reaction to seeing someone in a wheelchair is one of disgust. That is the claim that I am taking issue with, not with the obvious fact that someone who uses a wheelchair is unable to walk.

If you can't acknowledge that the dregs of society are in fact viscerally repulsive, then tolerating them is no sign of virtue.

  1. The OP explicitly referred not to "the dregs of society" but rather to average handicapped persons.

  2. I have not claimed that tolerating them is a sign of virtue; in fact, I have claimed the exact opposite: That tolerating them, or at least not being disgusted by them, is normal. That which is normal is, by definition, neither particularly virtuous nor particularly lacking in virtue. In contrast, if someone reacts with disgust at seeing someone in a wheelchair, that does seem to me to be indicative of a lack of virtue.

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Really? People will feel disgust at encountering a disabled person? Not empathy?

Well, they may feel empathy too, but yeah, disgust is a natural and healthy response to encountering someone who is diseased, weak, incompetent and ugly, just like admiration and attraction are a natural and healthy response to encountering someone who is healthy, strong, capable and beautiful.

Honestly your position throughout this thread reads to me as a paradigm of slave morality.

Well, it is nice to know that self-parody is not dead.

Really? People will feel disgust at encountering a disabled person? Not empathy?

Depends on the nature of the disability. Deformation, dismemberment, atrophy, oozing wounds and visible retardation will all cause disgust in most people. Hell, the myriad little debilitations and degradations of age will disgust young people who aren't used to seeing them. Empathy comes later, if at all, depending on the person. All this assumes no conditioning either way.

You of course, are not the OP, but it seems to me that the Green position on these matters is that disabled people, nor any of those other types of people, are not inherently ugly. So, if that is the basis of the claim that the scene depicted is ugly, then that answers my question: That calling the scene "ugly" is just another way of saying "I disagree with the political positions espoused." Which is fine; like I said, I thought the OP was making a different type of claim.

My point is that they needed to make it a stylicized cartoon in order to not repulse viewers. Whether that's any more than tangential to what OP intended, I don't know.

they needed to make it a stylicized cartoon in order to not repulse viewers.

I'll disagree, the aggressive stylized blandness is the most offensive thing about this picture.

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Really? People will feel disgust at encountering a disabled person? Not empathy?

Depends on the disabled person. Army vet lost his limbs serving? Long time engineer with a few missing fingers, maybe an eye lost, from on the job? Nah. Random autistic person obsessing about something? A little annoying, but not disgusting.

But people with, say, Down's, or other severe mental disablements, yes, they creep me right the fuck out. And people with more severe autism who have no concept of social cues can come out with some shockingly creepy things apropos of nothing.

but is the scene it depicts any uglier than, say, this one?

I mean, yes, obviously? The grafitti alone, to say nothing of all the people who've made themselves ugly.

Hm, I had to look pretty hard to find graffiti, and there is one person with pink hair; I am not sure who else depicted there can be described as having made themselves ugly (and I have certainly seen shades of dyed hair which are not at all ugly). So, I am guessing that that is not what the OP had in mind.

Pink hair, blue lipstick is a terrible combination, not to mention the septum piercing and maybe the person is blind, hinted at by the sunglasses, which is why they can't tell the person they are cuddling is a bearded lady. Or maybe not a lady, just a guy who can't grow more than a very scraggly beard.

Mostly it's the terrible smirky expressions on the faces. Nobody is smiling, they all have that quirked-lip smug look, like they are constantly thinking "look how great and unconventional I am, scaring the normies, congratulate me and validate me for being stunning and brave!", which is very unattractive.

Nobody is smiling, they all have that quirked-lip smug look, like they are constantly thinking "look how great and unconventional I am, scaring the normies, congratulate me and validate me for being stunning and brave!", which is very unattractive.

To be fair, I would say that's an extremely accurate depiction of the pink-haired types in the poster.

The funny thing about many of these people who really badly try to distinguish themselves as unique is that they still adopt much of the same underlying beliefs and values as the mainstream does, they just tend to proclaim it louder, take marginally more radical positions, and pretend that makes them "subversive". It's difference in the most trivial and safe manner possible, the type that's more likely to get you applauded instead of burned for heresy.

You had to look hard? There isn't an un-defaced building visible.

Undercuts are ugly, pink hair is ugly, whatever that beard creature is on the left is ugly. Almost everyone is fat and multiple people sport symbology of terrorist groups. And the vandalised pride flag is the most conceptually ugly thing in the world.

And the vandalised pride flag is the most conceptually ugly thing in the world.

You can tell exactly when gay men lost control of the movement, because gay men are good at design and prefer things to be pretty.

It feels vaguely alt-right-twitter-fascist to argue aesthetics like this, but come on. Everyone in that illustration is obese, save the two women wearing burkas, and though I personally rather like the way they look, the intention of a burka is to make women less attractive. Both buildings in the background have graffiti, including a delightful short paean to "CLIT" on the front door of the apartment building.

Opinions differ on the aesthetic quality of tattoos and piercings, but if you ask me they can be attractive only in isolation. When everyone in the foreground has a tattoo, piercings, or both, it's hard to argue that looks good.

And, sigh, though I don't personally have a problem with it.... it's worth saying the quiet part out loud: less than a third of the people in that illustration could be mistaken for ethnic Germans. That's a fine vision for America, but in a country where ~90% of citizens have European ancestry, what is that trying to say? What would it say if I put together a poster of my vision for South Africa and 3/4 of the people depicted were white?

Everyone in that illustration is obese, save the two women wearing burkas,

At least the woman on the bike may have some muscles under her fat and be strong as well as chunky. She does seem to be doing work, riding a delivery bike of plants and small fruit trees.

That's a fine vision for America, but in a country where ~90% of citizens have European ancestry, what is that trying to say?

I'd point out that despite the perceived lack of ethnic Germans, just about everyone in that picture seems okay with each other. If anything, there's a strong message being sent about assimilation into the beliefs of the progressive West - a world in which they didn't let their national or religious backgrounds divide people into certain locations. Indeed, the two seemingly Middle Eastern characters don't mind being around people who are engaging in some fairly sinful (by Islamic standards) activities.

It's assimilation into a mindset that, while not totally Western, is certainly closer to the West than it is any other culture's.

I'd point out that despite the perceived lack of ethnic Germans, just about everyone in that picture seems okay with each other.

Just about everyone in the picture is only engaging with one other person, generally the one they're banging, and ignoring the rest. Notably, not one person is actually helping someone else, or improving the community.

They don't 'mind' anyone, but neither is anyone helping the cripple in the street in front of them, or cleaning up the graffiti, or supporting the local businesses repair the damage that still leaves metal shutters instead of windows. This is a government that might pave the roads, but isn't clearing out the hornet nest between residential housing projects. If the utopian vision of the future isn't helping the less fortunate or past victims in times of relative plenty, what is the expectation when things go bad?

There's a saying that the opposite of love isn't hate, but apathy. The opposite of a cohesive identity isn't hatred of all other identities, it's indifference. Socially indifferent, atomized people don't create strong communities, or support strong social networks, because when the primary unit of caring is yourself and what matters to you, subsidizing someone else's welfare is a burden on you, and other people's misfortune is their own problem. The wheelchair person in the road may be getting a disability check, but no one is is offering her a push so that (s)he can go outside and walk the dog without pushing forward with one hand alone. No one is clearing a path on the side walk out of consideration, so that they one-free handed wheelchair-bound person isn't literally in the middle of the road, relying on bikers or vehicles to not hit them.

A cohesive social identity poster wouldn't have had everyone ignorring eachother, but people doing things as a group, not just with maybe one other person. Groups sharing a meal, or playing team sports, or cleaning up their communities, or helping eachother in small ways like helping a wheelchair person cross the road or use a sidewalk.

just about everyone in that picture seems okay with each other.

Well yeah, 'cos they're all banging each other (at least that is what I take from the visible PDA). Except the dad and kid, and I'm not even sure that is the kid's dad. It could be the mother's boyfriend in their polycule.

Really? The woman with pink hair is not obese. Nor the woman in the wheelchair. Nor the two people making out. Nor the guy talking on his cell phone. Nor anyone on the balconies, other than maybe the exercising woman. In fact, there is almost no one in the pic whom I would call particularly obese.

Re the demographics of the pic, that is a different question than re whether the scene is ugly. And someone else noted that this was displayed in a particular area, the demographics of which might be different

maybe the exercising woman

I'm pretty sure that's a guy, if you mean the one on the top left doing a yoga pose. They've got a beard. Not that that means anything nowadays, what with "men can get pregnant too, women can have penises".

Technically, you can be unhealthily overweight (BMI >25) without being obese (BMI >30). The two people making out are definitely at least overweight.

Medicine considers obesity a disease, one that is preventable. This supposed utopia has multiple visibly diseased people, suffering from a preventable condition.

Another minor point is the raccoon. It is an invasive species in Germany. A "Green" utopia should surely be free of invasive species. Or maybe they've been influenced by American media so much that they think it's normal to have raccoons living in cities. (Curiously, the squirrel depicted is the native red squirrel and not the invasive American grey squirrel. The Greens don't seem to have a coherent stance on invasive species.)

"Obese" is a quite low bar to someone seemingly used to American levels of fatness. It doesn't only mean "unable to leave the house because he is too wide for the doorframes.".

No, it does not. But, again, which of the people is obese under that lower standard?

The couple on the front right look like they put effort into looking bad.

So much of Progressivism strikes me as an aesthetic. Trump smells bad. He tastes bad. Same with "Magats." They are low status. It's an embarrasment to be related to one. What's fashionable changes with the wind, but what's unfashionable is easier to point to- conservatives stuck in their 1990s colorblind aesthetic.

And much like the old trope of poor conservatives voting against their own self-interest because they see themselves as one day becoming millionaires...

I think many poor progressives also vote against their self-interest because they imagine themselves as culturally elite, if not now, someday.

This was a Green poster for the most recent German election. Forget about whether or not it's feasible. Their idea of a utopia is just ugly (and never mind all the weird elements that frankly make it look like a far-right parody of what a liberal would want)

I don't think that's intended to be their utopia. It's just a poke in the eye to conservatives. There's more black people in that poster than were born in Germany last year (OK, maybe a slight exaggeration), everybody's gay, and for some reason there's an English "There is no planet B" sign.

What's the occult significance of the hedgehog?

Pre-op trans women are literally hedging the hog.

My guess is that people who own "nonstandard pets" (ie. other than dog/cat/goldfish/maybe mouse?) would tend to be more likely to be progressives than conservatives?

I would associate nonstandard pets with deep red tribe eccentrics keeping raccoons, primates, nondomesticated felines, etc, but I live in a much wealthier society than Germany and the rules might be different there.

It's a dog eat (hedge) hog world out there?

But then you compare that with whatever the hell this is. This was a Green poster for the most recent German election. Forget about whether or not it's feasible. Their idea of a utopia is just ugly (and never mind all the weird elements that frankly make it look like a far-right parody of what a liberal would want)

Forget the plainclothes but obvious FBI agents

I’d love to read it. I’ve wondered this too. Cultural libertines + economic libertarians (I.E. neoliberals) have to have the worst aesthetics possible. Its probably to do with the refusal of having standards for things since to judge would be contrary to freedom or something.

Ill take the pizza made by the new Italian prime minister over whatever this Noah Smith pizza is.

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