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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).
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 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.
I can't remember who said it, but there was the quote about poetry being vulgar post-Holocaust.
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There's also the progressive aesthetic that ugly is actually beautiful
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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.
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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.
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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?
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Yes. Very much so. Like comparing a classical painting and photos of a burn victim.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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?"
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.)
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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!
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.
The OP explicitly referred not to "the dregs of society" but rather to average handicapped persons.
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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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.
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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.
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.
I'll disagree, the aggressive stylized blandness is the most offensive thing about this picture.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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?
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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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
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".
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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.)
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"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?
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The couple on the front right look like they put effort into looking bad.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It's a dog eat (hedge) hog world out there?
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Forget the plainclothes but obvious FBI agents
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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.
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