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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   25538 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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I've noticed an increasing amount of chatter from both sides about dropping out of society -- to build a homestead, or to buy a house in some foreign, isolated part of the planet. Of course, "I want to live rural!" guys have been around for years, and actually living rural in 2024 is a pretty raw deal for most. But it's telling so many have made the leap from, "I want to live small", to "I want to live completely alone (with spouse/kid/dog)". I'm sure much of this springs from a genuine love for sustainable living, the quiet life, the country and all of its joys. But the vibe I get is a subtle rising tide of misanthropy, of decreasing faith in the common man possibly regardless of one's leaning. As someone else put it,

the extremist american patriot dream is to aquire assets that allow them to live independently from the country they "love" away from all society and culture on a metaphorical if not literal island

My question is: Have you noticed this too? Maybe my circle's blowing this out of proportion, but maybe not.

If so, what's going on here?

I've got a personal theory for what's happening. See, I'm not much of a gamer, but I play two games regularly: Fortnite and PUBG. Really they're just for stimulation while I chill out and listen to music/podcasts, but something pretty damn annoying happens almost every time. I'll be relaxing in-game, looking for loot at a calm pace, when some absolute beast of a player flies in out of nowhere and shreds my health before I can blink. Every time it feels like bullshit because I'm not even trying to compete at that level. All multiplayer games have separate queues for "casual" and "ranked", but inescapably there's a handful of sweat lords who've memorized the meta, who know exactly where the best guns and vehicles are, who throw their weight around in casual games and ruin the experience for everyone else.

And when this happens, my natural reaction isn't "This game's matchmaking has failed", it's "I'm tired of these dickheads, I should play single player games instead". In other words, this is an organizational failure. Humans are naturally excellent at organizing themselves into the right groups -- you throw hundreds of kids into the same school, and very quickly the correct circles will form. There's bound to be a lot of kids with nothing in common, but this is obvious to both parties, so they simply avoid interaction. All groups are autonomous and self-organized, and it works really well.

Online groups in 2024 are algorithm-organized. The internet has taken on a kind of 1800s-Manchester-factory-worker housing feel where everyone's crammed into the same tiny spaces despite our differences. We are now constantly aware of how the other half lives, what they are saying. It's like your teacher forcing you to let the annoying kid play kickball with your group, to sit at your lunch table, etc. Going online feels abrasive in a way it really didn't back then. In 2009 you'd hop on some forum and it felt exactly like hanging out with friends, a 100% positive and chill experience. Going online now is like hanging out with everybody. Sometimes it's good, but a lot of the time it sucks. I don't want to know what the guys I hated in high school think of politics, or movies, or anything. But now I'm going to hear it, over and over and over.

Maybe I'm nostalgic, right? 2009 was a long time ago, I was basically a kid...

But probably not. Because I have a solid point of comparison: I understand Japanese, and spend a ton of time on the Japanese web. What inspired this post is actually a single website, which is 5channel. It's the largest anonymous bulletin board on earth, but more accurately it's a collection of around 1000 bulletin boards with virtually zero moderation. You can post wherever you want, say whatever you want, and... it works. Not because the Japanese are polite or something -- they can get wild -- but because if you just let humans organize themselves, things work out. This echoes my own time as an internet moderator, where I first believed that I could shape the board through my actions, but later realized the board's quality was beyond my control, it's an autonomous process that you have little say in.

I pay $4 a month to post on 5channel. I've made hundreds of posts there, and yet no one's realized I'm a white foreigner. Despite the language barrier, I post there because it's sorta like the English web was back in 2009. There's none of the bullshit, it's a site for nerds to make dumb jokes and chat about nerd stuff. When I browse reddit or twitter or 4chan, there's a lingering unpleasant feeling, but when I go to 5ch it's just dumb fun. It's exactly like the net I grew up with. You compare the two, and the English web just feels... sick.

I'm 100% ready to believe this pessimism in the air comes from our inability to self-organize. We are locked in with people we do not like 24/7, reading their crappy opinions, we can't just splinter off and make a new community and so we live with a slight psychological chip on our shoulder but we're not sure why. What's funny is my narcissistic tendencies fade the more I use 5channel. When you're stuck around people that challenge your identity all the time, you get defensive and sorta retreat back into yourself. But when you're around people who aren't going to constantly irritate you or challenge who you are, you start to relax and open up. You may even turn into a bit of an optimist. Conversely, it's this constant feeling of "Someone's gonna try and screw with me" that sorta defines how English web feels now, why everyone's so antsy and defensive and unwilling to let their irony shield down.

Human groups are naturally pretty small. In nature, whenever any major divide happens, tribes just split off and go separate ways. Being forced into a semi-permanent state of clash really can't be good for us, despite how "normal" this has become.

A Catholic news site I followed kind of posted about the same topic today. Nothign to do with Catholicism, the author is just an Anglophile:

https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/a-perfect-week-ironic-invites-and

There’s scandal in the air in London.

The country’s chief spy, the head of MI6, has found himself front page news, along with the head of the British civil service, who has been hauled before a parliamentary committee to answer questions, under pain of perjury.

The scandal reaches further still into the upper echelons of the establishment, implicating members of the cabinet. Even the King has been named.

Pressure is mounting on those tainted, and the tone in the media is approaching full-blown McCarthyite paranoia.

From the outside looking in, you might well assume a dangerous threat to national security has been unearthed — a spy ring worthy of a le Carré novel, or conspiracy of McCarrick-level proportions. But, at least in the eyes of some, it’s actually worse than that.

All these men, and they are all men, stand accused of belonging to the Garrick, a somewhat famous, and famously men-only, private London club, after the membership rolls were obtained and published by the Guardian newspaper.

The Garrick, founded in 1831, is what in London is commonly called a “gentlemen’s club,” a term which I gather means something rather different and less genteel over here in America.

It’s one of a handful of such places that have survived into the third millennium, long past their heyday of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

They once flourished as places for men (yes, men) of different sections of society to meet, eat, drink, and sleep it all off in town. Each club has (had) its own core constituency, be it the military, the literary set, politics, and so on.

The Garrick has long had social cachet beyond its links to the world of theater and the arts, making it something of a target for fashionable criticism, though it’s not the first such club to come under fierce public scrutiny.

White’s, the club for properly posh chaps, had its turn a few years ago, with then-Prime Minister David Cameron having to resign his long-time membership in shame after being shocked, shocked, to discover they didn’t let ladies in.

After leaving office, “Call Me Dave” — as we used to refer to him in my time at Tory HQ — joined Pratt’s, an even posher club, where all the staff are referred to as “George” by custom. As it happened, Pratt’s let women in a few years after Dave joined, though I assume the members address all the new ladies as “Nanny.”

London men’s clubs are an object of occasional fascination and fury in the U.K.

People, and it should be acknowledged it’s usually a certain kind of lady, get very steamed up about them whenever they remember they still exist.

According to the popular imagination, clubs are dens of quiet power-broking and deal-making, shadowy old-boy networks, wood-paneled venues where favors are exchanged and patronage is doled out.

They are malum in se for their sexist admissions policies, of course, but made even worse because they are locking out ladies from the true corridors of power, where the real decisions are made.

But the sexism charge is silly, really.

That men (and women) behave differently in mixed company, and sometimes like a time and place to socialize among themselves, shouldn’t be controversial. Ladies’ nights out are a social staple for about half the people I know, and if you need convincing that dudes (or chaps) liking to hang out isn’t sinister, I doubt I’m the one to convince you.

More to the point, proper clubs for women exist, too, some of them, like the University Women’s Club, are very nice and just as old as the men’s, and they come under no political scrutiny or media ire.

The real suspicion, and the real anger against the men’s versions, is about power and influence. But that’s nonsense, too.

The reality is that clubs intended to facilitate “networking” and mutual advancement do exist, but they tend to be set up by and for women, as a reactionary move against what they imagine goes on at places like the Garrick. And thus they tend to fail — at least in London.

One such enterprise, Chief, opened a swanky London outpost last year, promising a women-only space for the senior ranks of the sisterhood to meet and mingle with like-minded “executives.” But it had to shut down last month for lack of interest, despite offering the chance to split spritzers with the likes of Amal Clooney and Gloria Estefan — or maybe because of that.

I’m not surprised places like Chief tank, since they are exactly what many people wrongly imagine London men’s clubs to be all about, and they sound awful. Real clubs continue to exist not because the members can use them to “network,” but because they’re some of the last places in Western urban life where “networking” is forbidden.

In fact, all the London men’s clubs I know have actual rules banning business talk. Full disclosure: I am a member of one such club, and used to be a member of another — neither as chic as the Garrick or as well-bred as White’s, though I’ve been a lunch guest at both.

What I love about my club is that, as I’m a socially awkward person by nature, it's a place where I am, as a matter of policy, welcome at any table and in any conversation, and always considered a friend.

While critics like to imagine hushed conversations to stitch up promotions and curry influence, I’ve instantly forgotten what anyone does for a living, if ever they told me. The banter is usually obscure, rather than topical. The finer points of trivia on my true passions, cricket and watches, are common subjects.

You’d struggle to call the atmosphere “conspiratorial,” or even especially dignified.

On one occasion, albeit several years ago, another member challenged me over lunch to recite Edward Lear’s poem “The Owl and the Pussycat” from memory and I had to be gently but insistently reminded by the maître d' not to stand on the dining room furniture, after I got too into my declamation and mounted my chair halfway through the second stanza.

The truth is, the kind of people who like to “network,” rather than socialize, make for terrible company — they instrumentalize human interaction, rather than enjoy it. It makes them insufferable, even to each other.

Those people are why places like Chief fail, and it’s why places like the Garrick and the University Women’s Club won’t let them in. They are, ironically, the very people you join a club to get away from.

And their demands to be let in are probably the single greatest impediment to single-sex clubs changing their rules. It’s not that clubs like mine can’t conceive of female members fitting in around the place — or can’t think of women who’d make good company — but they suspect those aren’t the kind of women who would be applying.

The same sort of people who are offended by the idea of all-male clubs tend to be even more offended by the idea of a club that just doesn’t want them, personally, and the tendency of clubs (like the Garrick) to attract lawsuits if they just think out loud about changing their rules is quite real. Being a single-sex space provides a modicum of legal protection in this regard.

I know some women I’d happily propose for membership, and their capacity for both claret and lyrical verse exceeds my own. But in truth, they’d probably never think of applying.

Groucho Marx famously said he didn’t want to belong to any club that would accept him as a member. The best sort of people usually feel that way, male or female. The trouble is that the reverse also tends to be true.

Clubs, really, are for the rest of us — the ones who just want a place that feels like home, safely away from, you know, other people.

Is that so wrong?

Why do you think that the right sort of women would not apply? Would they prefer to be among themselves for that kind of banter?

I didn’t author the opinion, but I think the author’s point is that women who try to integrate men’s only spaces are going to do it for the sake of making them integrated, not because they’re merely looking to socialize.

There’s no shortage of socialization opportunities for women, so to decide you must be socializing at this specific single sex club demonstrates that making it coed is your goal.

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