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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   25596 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 20, 2024

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Wow, that thread is a gold mine. I'm not sure about "exemplars", though, it seems more like a pattern that they learn from osmosis, because "that's just how people act". But maybe if they had people modeling a coherent vision of how to be "cool" that didn't involve such self-destructive behavior, they might choose a different path? (Wow, that sounds so 80s Reagan-era anti-drug...)

There's some other quotes that might point in a different direction: the scene is full of people whose entire life is riding on their image, but the image isn't based on anything real, and it's all become a social Red Queen's race. (Is this level 4 simulacra?)

I had lots of friends from high school who went on to do freelance art/media/music in my city. But the problem with freelancers is they cannot have honest social relationships because their social life is how they find work.

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The main issue is that the scenes all suck now so the only people left behind are the nitpicking dweebs. All the cool people that actually wanted to fight Nazis left when the Nazis did.

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The irony of course is that anybody who's actually emotionally invested in these circles is definitively not safe, and the only way to survive in these circles if you actually care about the people involved is to curl up into a little ball and delete more and more of yourself while making sure not to run afoul of any of the arbitrary, inconsistent, and continually expanding de facto rules and regulations pertaining to what you're supposed to believe and how you can be. If you've got a bone in your body that leans towards independent thought, or any natural proclivity towards mirth or joie de vivre, it can really alienate you from yourself.

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Some people know how to frame anything in such a way that it looks like a me too allegation (or whatever sj topic, its not important what the subject or allegation is whats important is the format they are using) and using all the right buzzwords to make it sound sinister and then you read through 7 pages of Instagram slides and you get to the end and its like "wait...what did they actually do?"

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They do it for a sense of community. That’s why extremists exist at all. They’re insecure and will adapt any ideology that will give them a community to feel like they matter and people like them.

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I think it’s flipping a bit. In my city people in the punk scene make fun of the PC punk shtick now. There definitely is a lot of “i present completely masculine and im a guy but im nonbinary / trans” though.

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