This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
It's also useful to think about how Communism made itself inspiring. You have bold posters of attractive, young, bold comrades ushering in a new world; powerful displays of military might and stories of the underdog throwing off the yoke of foreign oppressors through sheer will and heroism; technological marvels invented by Communism. (And, of course, the enemy is ugly, misshapen, obese old capitalist men.)
Turn that around. Create an unashamed capitalist aesthetic of beauty and power and success. If you do that, it's barely even necessary to paint Communists in any light at all. We certainly don't have that at all today. Probably Musk is the closest to that aesthetic, which is pretty pathetic when you think about it.
Oh, well, this is a first for me. Merging two current and active threads.
There is an interesting potential connection to this thread (tagging @jeroboam for awareness).
What if a way to encourage more children is to simply have a bunch of posters of attractive young people pumping out babies.
Yes, on two level. First, hate to say this, but Musk does code as .... weird. A lot of the Musk superfans are that precisely because they see Captain Aspergers doing so well and think, "one of us! one of us!" Normies might like Teslas, but they don't get Musk at all.
Second, he's a pretty awful model for paternal responsibility. By my count, he's got 12 kids with 3 women. Although those aren't Antonio Cromartie numbers, they're still up there. Again, a bad model for normies.
We need conserva-Chads. The frackas with Harrison Butker a few months back showed how those battle lines could get drawn.
On the one hand, that's why normies ended up getting their fancy electric cars from Tesla. As the old economics joke goes, there can't be a hundred dollar bill plainly lying on the ground, because someone would have picked it up already. Musk had to search through muck like "electric motors are for golf carts" and "it's literally rocket science, you're not going to beat Boeing or Lockheed!" to find his hundred billion dollar bills, because if you pursue ideas that any normie can see aren't stupid, then the normies probably already did, and some of them are way ahead of you to monetizing them.
On the other hand, most apparently-stupid ideas are apparently stupid because in fact they are actually stupid. In PvE fields like engineering that's still fine, because the math or the testing will winnow out the bad ideas anyway. If you try out 199 failed filament materials and one good one then you don't become famous as a 99.5% failure, you become famous as the guy who invented the light bulb. But in PvP fields like social media / business / politics, taking stupid ideas seriously in public burns credibility, wasting social capital you could have put to better use elsewhere. Musk does have enough actual capital to not care so much about that, and I can't help but be amused by someone using "fuck-you money" to literally tell people "fuck you", but he's investing in so many good causes that I wish he wouldn't waste so much opportunity cost on bad ones.
6 kids (5 surviving, one died of SIDS) with his first wife, one of whom publicly hates him. 3 kids (X, Exa, and Tau) with a later girlfriend (after his second divorce to his second wife, his third divorce total) who he's currently fighting for custody. 3 biological kids via IVF with one of his employees at Neuralink. This sounds like a bad model for Musk, not just a bad model for normies.
More options
Context Copy link
His personal life is a shambles, but so long as he doesn't flaunt it (and people only speak of it in hushed, ashamed tones), I don't care too much.
What he needs to do is: every time he feels compelled to share a 4chan greentext on Twitter, he should stop for a second, think about if it's a good use of his time, realize it's not, and instead take that energy and make another revolutionary, innovative, billion dollar company. We'd all be better off.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
To me, there needs to be a way to distill the James Taggarts of the fictional world into an image. Rand wrote outlandish heroes but compelling villains. That imagery is effective.
More options
Context Copy link
E/acc version: https://x.com/yasser_elsaid_/status/1827755425443328139
More options
Context Copy link
Thats what we have now! Capitalism produced Reagan, a square jaw movie hero turned president. Communism gave us Brezhnev, Castro, Mao and Kim Il Sung, all manner of fat ugly aesthetically and behaviorally discomforting golems. Even communist attempts at beautiful art were mediocre shitpiles, with Soviet Realism being a pastel pastiche of the colouring of Old Masters overlaid onto garish parodies of reality.
Communism is UGLY and gave us brutalism, plasticised film dolls ironically more unnatural than the west, and unaccountable leaders who didn't have any physical charisma at all. Che Guevera adorns all commie flags because he's the ONLY good looking commie. For every 10 Che simps there are 1000 posters of capitalists to simp over. But commies have ONLY Che to adorn.
Stalin looks like a respectable head of state, and was (according to women)quite fetching in his younger days.
More options
Context Copy link
Brezhnev. Mao and Kim Il Sung counted as average-looking men in their respective societies, I'd say. And Castro was a handsome man, supposedly.
More options
Context Copy link
That was half a century ago. We now have Biden, Trump and Kamala.
Still better than capitalist attempts at beautiful art we are currently being served. We just had a thread about how capitalism can't even do proper pop-culture slop anymore.
In capitalism the mere suggestion that we should have beautiful public spaces will get you purged from the party.
Who are marxists in all but name.
Even Newsweek has acknowledged that republicans are more attractive
Well, I included Trump on the list, he's no Adonis either.
Ben Garrison shows us the Trumps we see in our hearts but not our eyes, for his radiance burns our feeble eyeballs.
More options
Context Copy link
Age will have that effect, dude is 78.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Yea I get that, I truly truly truly do! Modern DEI wokism gives us distorted faces from ME:Andromeda and Star Wars Outlaws to design shitpiles like Concord or Dustborn, while the successors of communism give us gacha ptsd waifus and robot fuckdolls.
BUT that doesn't change the fact that communism is STILL ugly. Modern Starbucks seattle commies overlap with the capitalist class you rightly decry, pinning the hammer and sickle badges on their newsboy caps as they slave under capitalism, showing that true commies can't make anything beautiful. I think even the commie furries make ugly shit, with anything resembling beauty overlapping with nazbol furries.
I do not mean to be purely combative, but I really wish to know: what communist beauty actually is there? I am probably cheating by excluding modern China and its cultural/physical outputs, but like I really don't see communists producing anything beautiful historically.
If the Wikipedia page on “Stalinist architecture” is anything to go by, then communists have produced some things of beauty. Although a quick wiki skim suggests that the communists pre-Stalin were just as strongly married to their hideous architecture as our own architects of today are.
/images/17254340944042058.webp
More options
Context Copy link
That space realism shit they had going on in frescas was great, you got your muscular dude grabing the atom flying through space, you got your worker man and woman both beutifully detailed with their muscles wrangling a work implement vaguely in the direction of forward or upward. At least the artists in the CCCP knew what human beuty looked like.
Just look at it.
The west has lost even the will to depict this energy. I want my mass media to tell me, we're fucking going to space, and you and your wife will toil to make it happen. We're getting on that bloody moon rock or die trying.
Are you telling me that Memphis Corporate doesn't get you fucking JACKED UP to knock out some spreadsheets?!
More options
Context Copy link
Ok this one goes pretty hard. I dont put much stock in soviet films, architecture or music (plastic people of the universe arent soviet and its not possible to enjoy their music sober), and i already expressed disdain for soviet realism, but this poster fucks.
I personally blame the hays code for the weird plastic archie comics style plasticised all american boy aesthetic that permeated even the space raygun era of american science fiction art. ironically, watching out for commies made the outputs commie level fails. thanks hoover.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That's ok, I was mostly being contrarian for the fun of it, though it is interesting just how far I can take stuff like I wrote above without leaning into LARPing.
Though one problem I have with the question you're asking is that the parameters aren't clear. What is "communist beauty"?
Not just purely preservational/restorative. The Saint Petersburg and Moscow metros are gorgeous and clean. Compare to the metros in American cities, where you have a decent chance of having to step over poop or deal with a meth addict smoking on the train, surrounded by Corporate Memphis posters.
The ONLY thing appealing about communism is 'we promise to get rid of the degenerates you hate'. The low hanging fruit of public drunks and mentally incapacitated malcontents is a universal scourge everyone cheers to have removed. It is when the jackboots search for more necks to step on when the appeal loses out.
Whether the removed are helped or locked up is inconsequential. We just son't want them enshittifying our public space.
The downfall of western public spaces is entirely because criminal malcontents, especially but not limited to the highly melanated, act freely without sanction. Get rid of them and the animating disgust normies have will no longer be misdirected towards progcommie 'harm reduction' bullshit.
Seriously? The only reason people endorse communism is to stomp on black criminals?
If you’re going to toss out theories like these, you need to put in more work making them coherent. There are any number of ways to be more accurate and less inflammatory.
Banned for one week.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I thought the St Petersburg metro got started under the Tsar? If they continued to expand it while keeping it's style, I guess that should still count.
Looking at Wikipedia pages, both Moscow and Saint Petersburg appear post-revolutionary. There were talks of a metro in pre-revolution times, but those plans were for it to be above ground.
Well then, definitely a point for the commies!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link