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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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If you don't give a shit what I think, I recommend stopping the engagement. This will be my last comment given this fact. I do find it a bit hypocritical to complain about the "way you talk to me" when you like to throw in some "LMAO"s and "Bud"s and openly don't care about what I say, yet accuse me of condescension as I clearly state my opinions, but alas.

"You say you aren't a faceless representative of the other side, but that's exactly how you behave." You think that's how I behave, because you seem to have flattened everything in the world of cultural and artistic appreciation that you either have no interest in understanding or cannot understand into the bucket of 'globohomo woke' and the cultural left. Case in point, my argument, which you have repeatedly misunderstood, as below.

"yet as far as you know nothing I said about the show is incorrect". Yes....if you read my last paragraph, i stated that this was the case and that that wasn't my point. It is very tiresome to have your argument misunderstood over and over again despite stating it in plain terms.

Yes, I do in fact believe your practice of consuming artistic and cultural objects is intellectually lazy. Writing some text about why you think this is not laziness doesn't change that fact.

Am I supposed to take your comment regarding "irony of just desserts" as saying that your first comment wasn't serious? Or was it? If the former, then it seems a mistake to engage on this forum in that way. If not, I don't see why this should be some new understanding for me if you still support what you said there in earnest. That's not irony. I think calling it the irony of just desserts when the the behaviour in question is really just trusting negative reviews from people who don't know what they're talking about to spite people you dislike is dressing up the behaviour a little bit to make it more presentable and sound more sophisticated than it really is.

So you say word of mouth is your method of discovery. That would be fine, except for the fact that your word of mouth supply chain seems to also consist of people who don't consume or know much about the things that they positively or negatively recommend. So you're not getting much value there if the posts in this forum were sufficient evidence to stay away from this show. I stand by the fact that if there were something important and iconoclastic in this or other shows, you would be extremely unlikely to come across it given your artistic consumption habits.

"No bud, you said "My attitude privileges nothing" so you can tuck that condescension back up your sleeve, your attitude privileges positive coverage." So I said essentially a synonym of what I said that I did, with about the same meaning, and you have chosen to not believe me. Fair enough. Again, the only reason you seem to think that my attitude privileges positive coverage is that you think other faceless people do this and that I'm one of them. That's what happens when you treat individuals (and artistic objects) as if they're all in a bucket that you despise.

I will disagree that this concept is a core part of advertising. I stand by what I said, if someone admits ignorance of the thing they're reviewing, they will be roundly mocked. Reviews rely on the perception the reviewer knows what they're talking about. These people may in some cases be paid to say those things, but the outward message is that they have consumed the thing and are recommending the thing. Advertising from the company that makes a product itself or makes money off of it can be heavily discounted, and indeed I think most consumers understand this and are not deceived that the sexy person in a Lexus commercial has some intimate knowledge about cars and prefers a Lexus. This does require some intelligence and intuition on the part of a consumer to separate what the company wants your perception to be of the product and the reality of the product given marketing expenditures, but that's why there is a vast information ecosystem you can use to make this determination, and independent reviewers exist. Refusing to do this legwork and instead throwing out the baby with the bathwater is what I would call lazy.

I didn't speak down to you until you started doing so to me. That's what I do when people speak down to me. And you are still conflating refusing to stop talking about media I haven't watched with refusing to watch media I don't agree with politically. Ideally I would prefer the motte not acknowledge that kind of show at all, but since it was brought up, talking about it is the point of the forum. By your standards the only way to have a conversation is after giving the media the views they need, but hate watching pays just the same as watching in earnest.

That was what I meant about the irony in my first comment - you assumed I was seriously insisting we should all be loud dicks about anything we suspect we won't like, but I was exaggerating for comedic effect. I was actually the first person on the motte to vociferously argue for watching everything - even propaganda if you are in the right state of mind, although I have been reconsidering that lately. But you don't have to watch it in ways that profit the lazy and unscrupulous. Stereotypes only have significant value in impersonal interactions - for seeing the shape of the world, the pattern. When you are directly interacting with someone stereotypes can point you in the right direction, but individual elements of the pattern can and do behave erratically.