Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Is Germany "a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct genocide"?
Okay, more seriously (and less "bare link" phrased, Jeopardy-style, in the form of a question), does anyone else see things like this as part of an overall "strategy" by the left that strongly parallels the behaviors in recent years of "woke Hollywood" and game studios? That is, use identity politics as a tool to paint critics and opponents as bigots ('you don't hate our all-female reboot because it's a soulless cash grab with lousy writing and acting, you're just a sexist', 'you didn't vote for Kamala only because you hate blacks and/or women,' etc). "Schrödinger's critics": your opposition is just a few unimportant bigots who don't represent the audience/electorate and don't really matter; but when your movie/game/candidate flops, it's because of the immense power those same opponents have over the viewers/players/voters. The problem is that too many people are listening to fringe voices (whether that's YouTube movie critics, video game reviewers on Twitch, or 'purveyors of right wing misinformation' like Fox News and x.com), instead of professional, establishment movie critics/game journalists/political commentators; and we need to figure out how to mute those fringe voices. Taking your established fanbase/demographics for granted, and excoriate them if their support starts to wane ('how can you call yourself a Tolkien fan and not watch Rings of Power?' 'Sure, the Democrat party's policies do nothing for you, but you have to vote blue no matter who anyway' [a position I've seen left-wing YouTubers state in response to the election]).
In short, that you, the filmmaker/game studio/Democratic party, don't answer to your audience/voters, the audience/voters answer to you. You do not have to earn their dollars/votes, you are entitled to them, and if they aren't buying what you're selling, then they're wrong, and the strategy is to lecture them on what horrible bigots they are until they start watching your movie/playing your game/voting Democrat. And calling anyone who disagrees with you a fascist. (That "Unfortunately, this decision affects the wrong people" bit is wild coming from those making the decision in question — as if they have no agency over this decision, but it is instead somehow just a natural consequence somehow emerging automatically.) As Jim put it: "Doing an audit of federal government expenditures is the death of democracy, and doing a customer survey is openly fascist."
Even shorter: it's treating that Simpsons bit with Principal Skinner that's become a meme — "Am I so out of touch? No, it's the children who are wrong." — as a marketing/campaign strategy.
There’s a difference between strategy and reflex. I think what you’re seeing from Hollywood is the latter. Mass media hasn’t yet come to terms with the fact that it’s Balkanizing.
Producers want to be culturally relevant. Audiences want to feel like they’re witnessing the next big thing. Both are measuring success by the moviegoing culture of their childhoods. Neither has adapted to the realities of modern movie distribution, which has made movies much more accessible but also softened their cultural impact.
The easiest way for producers to defend their egos (and budgets) is cherry-picking. Conveniently, technology has also increased the accessibility of reviews, diluting the influence of movie critics. As it turns out, it’s much easier to discredit Internet randos than critics with skin in the game. “Racism” is occasionally a convenient way to gerrymander a line around the loudest critics of a film.
Audiences buy in whenever it is in their own interest. The obvious examples are all-female reboots and 80s nostalgia grabs, but I’ll add another genre: the Christian drama. It doesn’t matter if Fireproof is critically panned; it fills a market niche. They’ve got their own awards and their own box-office success.
Hollywood doesn’t want to play to that model because it spent so long as the cultural touchstone. Hence, racism.
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Replying primarily because @MadMonzer was kind enough to report himself and this comment for being CW, and likely better suited for posting in the CWR thread. I presume that's where it was meant to go, but if this is, in your honest opinion, a small-scale question, then don't let me keep you haha. But I do think you meant the main thread.
For what it’s worth, SQS does explicitly allow Culture War topics. It’s just a relaxation of the effort rules.
So there’s nothing wrong with this post, but also, it would totally qualify as a good CW top-level.
I haven't seen a mod-hatted reply to my own for so long that it gave me a fright, visions of a bloody-coup and counter-coup as we ban each other left right and center till Zorba gets annoyed and stops paying the AWS bill.
I tried to get naraburns to ban me once for a gag, but it didn’t seem to take.
Stop it, you two, they'll think the mods have a sense of humor.
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The problem is that the sequence of mouth noises "freeze peach" has acquired a secondary meaning - when very online people - on either side of the US culture war - hear the noises, they don't point to the concepts traditionally associated with "free speech" (i.e. the ability to say what you want without fear of punishment by people more powerful than you), they point to the anti-establishment wing of the Red side of the US culture war.
More speech is banned on Musk's Twitter than Dorsey's Twitter. (Trivially, because most Twitter censorship is done by non-US governments, and DorseyTwitter consistently resisted foreign censors to the best of its ability whereas Musk rolls over if he finds the government in question friendly.) Musk bans people who annoy him whimsically, most often nominally based on an incredibly-broad "doxxing" policy which covers almost any dissemination of accurate information about an identifiable individual and is selectively enforced. Elon Musk has also threatened, and boasted about his limited success in, lawfare-to-the-death against his critics to punish publication of accurate information about the way he runs X that he considers biased or misleading - this is the least speech-that-is-free thing you can do as a private citizen, but it is very freeze peach because punishing people for calling out anti-establishment-right speakers makes it easier for the anti-establishment right to speak. So when Musk talks about being a "free speech absolutist" despite having multiple outstanding SLAPPs in the federal courts, calling for the reversal of Sullivan, tweeting threats of prosecution against his critics etc, the very online right hear "freeze peach absolutely," agree, and cheer, the very online left hear "freeze peach absolutely," agree, and boo, the few remaining principled liberals hear a censorious asshat claiming to support free speech and try to call out the hypocrisy, and the darkly cynical raise eyebrows and say "this is your brain on ketamine."
If you treat Vance as talking about speech-that-is-free to a European audience, then his comments were mostly false if taken literally, directionally correct but exaggerated if taken seriously-but-not-literally, and bizarre if treated as an attempt to achieve some kind of political goal of US foreign policy*. Everyone in Europe who is sufficiently interested in politics to pay attention to a speech by the US VP already understands the free speech situation in Europe better than Vance does, so the only people who didn't respond by thinking "what a tool" are the ones who live in an anti-establishment right-wing social media filter bubble. Even people like me who think that Europe does have a free speech problem can see that a tendentious intervention by a senior official of an increasingly hostile (based both on the rest of the speech and on Trump admin policy towards the EU) foreign government is going to be counterproductive.
If you treat Vance as talking about freeze peach to the global-but-mostly-American audience of partisans in the US culture war, then everything makes sense including Margaret Brennan's response. It's megaphone diplomacy of a type that often backfires, but that's the way Trump has rolled since before 2016 and it's what his domestic supporters expect. Trump's America does want to see more freeze peach in Europe, whether or not this is actually in the US national interest. Freeze peach (in the sense of differential tolerance of right-wing speech that tests the boundaries of permissible rhetoric vs actual incitement) was one of the tools the Nazis used to take power in Germany, although not the most important.
I was initially concerned by this story because most of the coverage I saw didn't make clear who said the dumb stuff about Germany, and I assumed from the attention the whole thing was getting that it was a German official. That would be worrying. But it is some MSM pretty face with no reason to matter beyond her parents being able to afford out-of-State fees at UVA. Vance talks like a right-wing blowhard when a Bush-era Republican would at least try to be diplomatic. Margaret Brennan's response makes clear she is as dumb as Rachael Maddow. Bear shits in woods. The Pope coming out as Catholic would be more newsworthy.
* Notably, the reaction to Vance's speech has increased the chances of European leaders effectively sabotaging Trump's policy of appeasing Putin in Ukraine from none to slim.
Sometimes I feel like living in a different universe.
First, Dorsey twitter absolutely worked together with many agencies in many countries far above what is was required to do, shown trivially by the fact that Musk Twitter refuses to do so and is nevertheless existing. This was shown in the twitter files, but they are hardly necessary; Here in Germany, our local Blockwarte voluntarily complain about nothing but how much better they could "work together with" Dorsey Twitter to combat "misinformation" than with Musk Twitter. This also goes for the UK. Even beyond western countries, where Musk Twitter is far more resistant to censorship efforts and which have far more resources to staff liaison bureaucrats and as such are a much greater threat to open discourse, Dorsey Twitter was also more than happy to go along with censorship in non-western countries as long as it fit with their left-leaning preconceptions, such as in Brazil or South Africa.
Second, the moderation staff of Dorsey Twitter not only was much, much larger and could handle much greater throughput, but pretty much everyone is primarily complaining about who is allowed to continue posting, and voluntarily leaves due to it, as opposed to being banned. I've seen a lot of people and institutes around me make a big show about posting how they're leaving X and going to bluesky. Not a single one of them was banned, and almost none of them complained about any person ban or topics ban whatsoever, either. It's always about how now that this or that category of person is unbanned, they can't in good conscience stay there. At most they point at some nebulous alleged algorithmic boosting which they have no evidence for but are sure has to exist (and which, ironically, provably existed under Dorsey Twitter, it was just going another way). I don't think it's a coincidence that X discourse has moved closer to the notorious chan-style discourse.
Third, the kind of topics that could get you banned on Dorsey Twitter was incredibly broad, and frequently included taking even milquetoast center right opinions ("there are only two genders") or very basic common-sense observations ("the covid vaccine, just like many other vaccines, has a heightened likelihood of complications for people with autoimmune diseases and as such may not be worth it especially for young people with an autoimmune disease"). People went to other places since they either already were banned or felt they would get banned if they openly discussed the topics they care about.
I'm certainly not happy about how trigger-happy Musk is about criticism of himself or how he runs his company, but in practice it's not only an incredibly limited topic, it also would have gotten you banned on Dorsey Twitter as well, even labelling it similarly as "misinformation" or "conspiracy theories". On doxxing I'm also more split, since this was weaponized pretty hard on Dorsey Twitter.
Also on the Vance talk, I'm an academic who has lived his entire life in Europe (mostly Germany and a few years UK), and I think he's just objectively correct about his statements, not just directionally but also literally, so there's that I guess. It was very moving to see that if we want to have a course-correction, we will have some allies in foreign governments that will help us and stand by us. That's a fairly straightforward foreign policy strategy. The norm-breaking criticism is also pretty hilarious to me, since visiting american democratic politicians love talking about right-wing dangers in Europe which is totally OK, but once it's american republican politicians talking about left-wing dangers it's suddenly a dangerous break with norms.
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I'm not prepared to concede either part if that argument in nothing but your word. DorseyTwitter banned something like half of the accounts I followed, most of which are either American or Anglo, so I don't believe it's due to foreign goverents, nor do I believe that there are more bans than we used to have.
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