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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   28316 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 23, 2024

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But what Walsh is actually revealing is two not-very-surprising realities of human nature: First, that every group has an awful fringe, and it’s easy to make that group look bad if only the fringe’s worst moments survive the cutting-room floor.

Not having watched this film yet (I intend to at some point due to the generally positive reviews from across the political spectrum - I'm not particularly familiar with Walsh and have no interest in What is a Woman, though I've seen his name and face* on social media second hand), this sentence went a wildly different direction than I thought it would go based on what I'd heard of the film. What I would have written would have been something more like:

First, that every group has an awful fringe, and therefore it's incumbent on every group not to subvert their ability to discriminate against and excise this awful fringe, lest they empower that fringe and cause awfulness to happen.

Because one thing that's clear about the movements behind the types of activists that are being mocked in this film is that they subvert this ability in many ways, e.g. by valuing an argument based on the race of the arguer rather than the quality of the arguments, which have enabled both cynical grifters and naive true believers to form an awful fringe that gets glossed over at least and institutional backing at worst. It seems like the original sentence was meant to call out Walsh as acting badly by shining a light at this awful result of this incompetent-at-best/malicious-at-worst behavior by these movements rather than calling out the very things that caused the awful result in the first place.

The second part also has a somewhat similar phenomenon going on; exploiting the human instinct for avoiding confrontation was a major means by which these awful fringes became as popular and influential as they did, which is what even allowed Walsh to have content upon which to base this film in the first place.

* I gotta say, if I hadn't heard of Walsh before I saw his face, I would have guessed that his ideology was the exact opposite of what it actually seems to be. Which, I guess, probably made it a lot easier for him to blend in while filming this.

I gotta say, if I hadn't heard of Walsh before I saw his face, I would have guessed that his ideology was the exact opposite of what it actually seems to be. Which, I guess, probably made it a lot easier for him to blend in while filming this.

He literally disguised himself while filming this.

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