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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   37170 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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The French Olympic ceremony is a travesty. The lack of rehearsal and disjointed segments swapping unceremoniously between live and made-for-TV videos, the ham-fisted DEI multiculturalism, and the overriding of historical French artists for modern Hollywood slop all imply the horrendous organization of this opening. Cameras have to constantly cut around to find something to show while most of the performers are largely walking around waiting for some unknown cues.

Dukas' Sorcerer's Apprentice getting prematurely cut off for an awful video featuring the Despicable Me's (tm) minions was, for me, the most poignant moment so far. Out with the traditionalism and that boring culture, in with the latest schlock to maximally consume product!

What is the breaking point? At what point does the logistics, infrastructure, and labor fail to support the bloated mass of the new? At what point will the cultures, artists, and creativity of Europe be crushed under a mass of a billion immigrants, a throng of unproductive mouths to feed? Will it go out in a bang or a whimper? Will it evolve and find a new way to thrive, or will it be absorbed and cannibalized into something unrecognizable?

At least the baroque counter tenor was a nice touch, even if it is framed in the modern nonbinary perspective.

Feels like, Olympics by Olympics, the ratio of importance placed on the opening ceremony and importance placed on the event itself turns more to the favor of the former.

In 2028, NBC will air the first Olympics coverage with no events at all.

Foolishly I got my news on the opening ceremony from the BBC, who make no mention of any problems or embarrassments at all, and just breathlessly report it as the greatest show on earth.

I would have expected the Anglos at least to be Francophobic enough to tell the truth, but apparently globohomo must not be embarrassed. The Party is always right!

Some of the British press did make fun of it, but the state broadcaster isn’t going to viciously mock one of the country’s closest allies during an (effectively) ‘official’ ceremony. On the live broadcast there were certainly some chuckles and incredulity, by the way.

Agreed. It was absolutely horrible. Part of the sloppiness was maybe because it was pissing down rain and they weren't expecting that. But the bizarre non-binary TV clips and essentially Greatest Showman vibes from everything else made me feel like I really am just out of touch with anything related to entertainment now. And what's with a black French female pop star named Aya Nakamura who is in no way Japanese? I guess I'm glad there's no outcry of Cultural Appropriation, but I can't help imagine if a white guy with dreadlocks and calling himself Abdou Njie had jumped up and started rapping the heavens would have fallen. The Japanese TV announcers even pointed out awkwardly "Her name is Aya Nakamura but she has no connection with Japan."

She apparently renamed herself after Hiro Nakamura from "Heroes". Weird, certainly.

The Japanese TV announcers even pointed out awkwardly "Her name is Aya Nakamura but she has no connection with Japan."

Did they mean that as "WTF is this foreigner doing?" or as "Finally, the foreigners understand the inherent superiority of the Japanese language?"

I don't know. Japanese politeness makes sarcasm very difficult to employ, but the fact that Nakamura doesn't use kanji means her name is really just sounds, not Japanese. I suspect the comment was just explanatory to ward off speculation.

I guess I'm glad there's no outcry of Cultural Appropriation, but I can't help imagine if a white guy with dreadlocks and calling himself Abdou Njie had jumped up and started rapping the heavens would have fallen.

The rules for this are simple: you can freely "appropriate" from people below you in the progressive stack.

The Japanese TV announcers even pointed out awkwardly "Her name is Aya Nakamura but she has no connection with Japan."

LMAO

The Olympic Games have gotten worse every iteration. The coverage is so bad that it’s nearly unwatchable. The coverage barely bothers with competition and has been steadily replacing the sports with ever longer and more maudlin stories about how the poor athlete had to overcome so much to even make the team. Most of the opening ceremony coverage thus far has been various celebrities, none of whom have anything to do with the Olympics and many of whom are no even remotely athletes.

I think honestly the only reason I’m in is to catch the obscure sports that most people don’t care about when they put them on minor cable networks or YouTube or something. Fencing is fun to watch and doesn’t get enough ratings to warrent ruining with biographies instead of showing the matches.

I think honestly the only reason I’m in is to catch the obscure sports that most people don’t care about when they put them on minor cable networks or YouTube or something.

Isn't that the whole point of the olympics? Most of its sports are things that would never get any sort of audience normally. It's just not that fun watching sprinting, weightlifting, rowing, etc normally. watching them once every 4 years with "fierce international rivalry!" and "olympic gold medal!" at stake is about as much as most people care to watch them. The big sports like soccer and basketball are kinda lowkey at the olympics, since there are other, better tournaments to watch them.

I feel like the olympics coasted for a long time during the 20th century based on the USSR vs USA rivalry. No one cared about the actual athletes or the sports themselves. I guess the networks are trying to add "human interest story" to make us care about the athletes, but frankly most of the athletes are extremely boring people who practice like a machine, nonstop every day at an extremely tedious sport, just to shave of 0.1 seconds and win 5 minutes of fame at the olympics. It might have been more fun to learn about them back when they were actually amateurs and had a life outside of sports, but those days are long gone.

Someone smarter than me pointed out on twitter that it's heads they win, tails we lose

If we tune in to satanic mass, we're participating in and tacitly accepting their blasphemy (or just incredibly bad coverage, if you prefer)

If we tune out, we're taking the wind out of the sails of an ancient western tradition celebrating achievements of excellence. Which is about the most 'trad' or 'based' or whatever the kids are saying these days thing you can do

Sounds like it's time to make an alt Olympics.

The X-Games are basically that (but with an alternative rock extreme sport sort of vibe)

Do those still exist?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Games

Looks like it

You can skip the opening ceremony, watch the sports that you feel best reflect athletic ideals, and skip the ones that don’t. It’s a tiny signal but a signal nonetheless.

If they bother to show the competition. Of late most of the competition isn’t even aired. They instead choose to air feel good “overcoming adversity” stories until it’s time for the top contenders an the American athlete to go. Gymnastics is going to be a giant hug box, and so will swimming until an American is in the heat. At least things like archery, weightlifting, synchronized swimming, and rhythmic gymnastics are obscure enough that they’ll show the competition.

I just turned on NBC this morning hoping to watch some olympics and the first thing I see is some chick's hospital selfies. I had to switch to USA network showing badmitton to get some action.

I'm seeing a lot of rumblings in Catholic circles about the drag performance aping The Last Supper. A lot of "there's one religion in particular where they never would have engaged in this mockery."

Also for extra Culture War points they included a child.

Well sure, they don’t want to die. Meanwhile, what are the Catholics gonna do?

Meanwhile, what are the Catholics gonna do?

Discreetly hire organised crime to break some legs. That'd do it.

Do what? The message won't resonate if you don't take credit. People are afraid to badmouth Islam not just because you might get visited by people who might let it slip that they were hired by the Muslims as they break your legs. People are afraid to badmouth Islam because a very obvious jihadist might cut your head off and nothing will be done to curb the ideological programming young men like him get in their communities.

The message won't resonate if you don't take credit.

I don't think that's true. If high profile theater kids engaging in what's very stale (God has been dead for quite some time) but nevertheless tasteless public blasphemy met freak accidents, were found suffocated inside carrier bags or hanging alive head down in the woods with zero attribution, other nihilistic theater kids would take notice.

I don't even hate these performances because they're blasphemous, they're extremely cringe. If people want to be weird sex freaks, I don't want to see that in public or know about it.

There's also the obvious jihadi advantage that they're willing to die. So some rando can pick up a knife and stab people at a farmer's market or subway. This requires much less overhead or structure.

Organized crime would prefer to make money without being labeled as a terroristic enterprise and getting the full force of the government turned on it, no matter how much you offer. Rational people just aren't as scary.

When they go after people leaving skid marks on rainbow crossings, is it because LGBT activists are so violent?

That’s the ingroup. Islamists aren’t in-group for Western elites, they’re just scared.

The reaction of a large chunk of Western elites to Gaza can't be explained just by being scared.

Which reaction are you talking about? Most seem to be trying to thread the needle between various political factions.

There's a large chunk of the elites that are sympathetic to Gaza and oppose Israel, in ways that can't be explained by just being afraid.

Those people aren't really elites. They quite literally are just kids on college campuses, and we can tell this because they're routinely getting in trouble- slaps on the wrist but still trouble- for it.

More comments

At what point will the cultures, artists, and creativity of Europe be crushed under a mass of a billion immigrants, a throng of unproductive mouths to feed?

I thought this was going to be an anticapitalist screed until it took this turn. Mass immigration poses issues, but I fail to connect it to boring, incompetent, commodified art.

The olympics have become a famously ill-advised production. The number of cities bidding to host gradually fell to just two in 2024: Paris and LA. The IOC already awarded 2028 to LA over concerns there might not be any interest in a few years. Broadcast revenue is flatish, but broadcast hours are way up.

I thought this was going to be an anticapitalist screed until it took this turn. Mass immigration poses issues, but I fail to connect it to boring, incompetent, commodified art.

Trying to connect them, for my own amusement more than anything:

  1. Rapid diversification creates a desire for models to manage diversity.
  2. America's model is quite well known.
  3. It's adopted both by the cultural elites but more importantly by the mass of new citizens who want a way to express their situation.
  4. Art thus tends towards a globalized, already commodified version of American culture with assumptions that feel inauthentic in local contexts , local culture becomes reskinned GAE culture, and drag queens proliferate.

The 2032 Olympics have been awarded too, to Brisbane.

boring, incompetent, commodified art.

To me these three things signal something like 'a water color landscape on a European streetcorner'

Not men with beards in sequin dresses dancing provocatively or the-inversion-of the last supper

We are basically different species at this point.

Paris and LA

I guess we would have gotten the same result either way. Would have been nice to avoid the humiliation and political instability though.

Any suggestion for why it seems to be so technically poorly run? DEI seems unlikely to be the culprit for obvious lack of rehearsal.

They're using the entire waterway as the stadium? Kinda hard to rehearse things like this.

France has always been gay and cringe. It was a good idea for them to lean into it.

France could have been the masters of the universe if they hadn't gone into a frenzy and changed the week to 10 days, etc and killed the king. Don't kill the king - bad move - you have no authority with which to replace him.

Leading to people begging Napoleon toward the authority to restore order who then inadvertently established modern Germany by destroying the HRE. Leading to a century long conflict for continental dominance that Germany certainly lost (twice), but France certainly didn't win.

They were the Lingua Franca masters of the earth right up until they weren't. Jesus Himself must've wept

(All just my opinion - blowing smoke)

The Ancien Regime certainly didn't appear to be a budding European hegemon. It had recently lost the biggest war in living memory, along with most of its colonial empire(some of which was ceded to Britain after the war, but some of which was abandoned because France was declining). It was in debt up to its eyeballs, was generally considered much worse run than its main competitors internally, and the royal family was widely considered to be at a low point. Religious tensions just kept flaring up and causing a big issue, Britain was growing wealthier and wealthier in comparison by the day, and the army was widely recognized as needing major reforms.

France's pinnacle of power was in the mid-19th century, when it was a firm #2 globally behind Britain, and probably #1 on the continent(this is before German unification). Even prior to the seven years war, France was vying for #2 along with Britain and (less effectively)Russia and Holland, behind Spain.

Annexing Belgium and keeping it would have been enough to make France the European hegemon permanently.

I wonder if DEI is sometimes a scapegoat for a general slackening of standards and lessening of giving a F.

But then you have to ask what caused that slackening.

You could bring DEI back into the conversation and say that the need to deny that there is anything wrong with preferring "DEI hires" requires everyone to lower their standards so as not to make it too obvious what's going on.

This feels like there might be something to it but I could caution against taking up such a narrative too quickly. There are other options, such as mass affluence leading to a general slackening.

It's worth asking oneself, "How have I been part of the problem?" Did I prefer professors who "curved" my grades? Etc.

DEI is pernicious but it need not be the explanation for all observed incompetence.

Yes, I think affluence has a far more significant role in declining standards than DEI, the societal equivalent of “zero interest rates phenomena”. You can see similar declines in willingness to suffer for excellence in East Asian cultures (the “lying flat” movement in China, for example) and the decline in formal dress, neither of which are plausibly identified with DEI.

But I think this explanation also should make us wonder whether maybe it’s all for the best. Living has never been easier and appetites have never been more easily satisfied. Isn’t this what winning is supposed to look like?

appetites have never been more easily satisfied

What different worlds we live in. Not that I live in one where what you said isn't true; but I do live in one where this is not a good thing.

There are problems which, solved, make us better. There are also problems which, solved, make us worse.

I’ve often felt the same. The decline in standards started long before DEI existed— if you look at attitudes toward education and achievement, up until the 1950s it was just expected by society that you’d work hard in school and at your job. And I think a good chunk in the USA’s decline started with including ADA kids in mainstream classrooms. Because of that, they had to begin adjusting standards downward to allow kids with IQs in the 70s to graduate with the rest of their class. Add in the rise of the educational Karen who’s going to the principal to get her kid’s grade raised to preserve GPA and you just can’t keep standards high.

if you look at attitudes toward education and achievement, up until the 1950s it was just expected by society that you’d work hard in school and at your job.

Off the top of my head, I think Tom Sawyer demonstrates otherwise.

Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn were both written from the point of view of the children involved and as such do not make a good case for the adults of that era not caring about education or any ther opinion.

Agreed. The fifties are really a high point of American 'do what you're supposed to do' social conformity of the kind we associate with Japan, the nordics, etc today.

Amazing what happens when a bunch of young men come home with military discipline having been drilled into them. If only that didn't require, well you know

You can have conscription without a major war, even if it's not politically feasible.

Isn’t this what winning is supposed to look like?

No. Winning is supposed to look like getting an increase in resources and abilities, allowing you to tackle even more difficult challenges, ad infinitum.

The shonen manga conception of winning, perhaps. I think, more generally, "winning" is just simply conquering some barrier or challenge, and hopefully leaving said barrier/challenge behind.

Yawn, the Olympics are old news by now and have been completely borgified. There are hundreds of renditions of the Sorcerer's apprentice on Youtube with better acoustics than whatever the olympics opening ceremony can muster. Plus none of them are going to get cut off (if your adblock is functioning properly that is) halfway in the middle. If that's what you want you can enjoy it there.

I'm waiting for the enhanced games personally, genetics has shown us by now that the advantages some people naturally have are little different to what happens if others take drugs, e.g. some people just naturally have lower myostatin (which restricts muscle growth) than others, meaning they bulk up faster and easier. They can compete in the Olympics just fine but it's a massive scandal if another person not with these mutations takes a myostatin inhibitor to make their body do the exact same things the first person's body is doing.

I'll be surprised if the Enhanced Games meaningfully outdo the normal games in performance. Inherently only people outside the top echelons of their respective sport will sign up to something that'll likely lead to their banishment from normal athletic events for life, and the actual Olympians are already using reasonable amounts of doping based on how often caught drug cheats aren't exactly romping the competition.

Bad as it is, it’s going to be nothing compared to 2028 in LA when it comes to culture war on display. I’m actually picturing it now (certain segments aren’t hard to predict) and lmao.

Topping this: https://rdrama.net/post/287384/turn-on-the-olympics-see-this from today will be quite hard.

I'm so very glad RES lets you turn of subreddit CSS. No idea why people bother with stuff like that.

While I agree 2028 will be worse from a culture war perspective, I'd at least give them that it will be much more choreographed and better rehearsed than what just was on the TV.

Were Gojira any good?

Judge for yourself.

It's a bit style over substance in my opinion, but it's probably the most decapitated heads and fake blood during any Olympics opening ceremony to date.

Maybe in 100 years we’ll have a Moscow Olympics that caricatures the slain Romanov children.

At the moment, Russian official ideology appears to be trying to have both "the Russian Empire is our glorious legacy" and "the Soviet Union is our glorious legacy". Until that changes, I doubt caricaturing the Romanov children will fly.

I thought the part where the opera singer raised her fist as she sailed past the blood of beheaded nobles being emptied into the Seine while heavy metal played in the background was a bit much.

Baller shit.

Literally the only good part. Except maybe the horsey.

I saw the recorded videos, and they sounded amazing. I got goosebumps.

I honestly missed their segment; I was flipping between TV and my work computer in another room so I mostly popped my head out when there was a piece of classical music I recognized.

What is the breaking point? At what point does the logistics, infrastructure, and labor fail to support the bloated mass of the new? At what point will the cultures, artists, and creativity of Europe be crushed under a mass of a billion immigrants, a throng of unproductive mouths to feed? Will it go out in a bang or a whimper? Will it evolve and find a new way to thrive, or will it be absorbed and cannibalized into something unrecognizable?

I hate to break it to you, but the call is coming from inside the house on that one. The immigrants don't care either way for this stuff, and "artists of Europe" are, among others, the ones leading the way here. I used to think there's a breaking point, that someone at some point is going to see things are not working the way they're supposed to, but at this point it seems clear that this is what our elites want, so this is what we'll keep getting.

Don't forget the masked Assassin's Creed™ torch carrier. I bet Ubisoft paid for this advertising. Strange they have money for that, but are unable to hire legitimate advisors for AC: Shadows.

The statues of important French women featured the pro-abortion advocate, but omitted Jeanne d'Arc. I assume this is because the latter is associated with the "far-right" in France.

If only someone could have bombed that moment with a drone carrying the Stop Killing Games URL on a banner.

As an Englishman I’m pleased to hear it. We were this close to settling the Hundred Years War and then Henry V got dysentery and some peasant women ate ergot-infested bread and the whole mess kicked off again.

I actually think the AC thing may have been completely free, given how Ubisoft helped out massively for the reconstruction of the Notre Dame.

Speaking of, I'm a little surprised that there's no thread on the recent developments with regard to Shadows, including the accusations of plagiarism and the apology letter from Ubisoft.

I think there have been a few discussions.

Yeah. Hasn't really been a ton to discuss lately beyond the absurdity of the matter.

The last top level post about Ubisoft was around when Yasuke was announced, on may 20th.

I must have missed that discussion. Also the idea of black samurai may seem good to some, but it's almost completely fabricated nonsense, and the author of African Samurai has lately been repeatedly pilloried by Japanese historians. At best his book is historical fiction that takes many liberties, at worst it's an alternate reality account.

Edit: spelling

What is it that they're saying? When the controversy popped up, I found this reddit thread and the arguments seem convincing that Yasuke was a samurai or at least plausibly could have been. Is there significant doubt about the veracity of the sources we have on him?

Well it's a mess and you have voices arguing many perspectives. You can run this through a translation if you like, it's a change.org site to (probably very unrealistically) rewrite the Lockley book with added changes....

Ah, probably what I was thinking of. There were rumors for at least a year before that.

I didn't even catch that it was a video game reference, I haven't played an assassins creed since ACII

Assassin's Creed Brotherhood is still good, but you can already tell the series has lost the spark that went with Patrice Désilets.

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