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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'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."
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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