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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   45551 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 5, 2022

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I will contest this. There is actually no argument creation at all going on.

The aesthetics of it are there, fancy words, conjunctions, etc. But if you actually examine the content she says nothing.

It's what I find most infuriating about the schtick besides the horrid aesthetics. It's all darkly hinting and citing left philosophers without ever embracing a concrete position. Which is key to her survival of course because any breadtuber that embraces a position is doomed to be called out for it at some point by his peers.

But I mean maybe I'm wrong.

Can you name the novel insights and philosophical arguments made in these long form pieces she isn't just repeating from someone else and would stand behind as true? Because I got nothing.

I think she's been building an interesting thesis with Envy/Opulence about the difficult relationship the left has with material success -- both on the aesthetics of wealth and how social mores may have developed around flaunting (and then how those aesthetics are reappropriated and recontextualised). Confronting the extent to which snark about McMansions or Fyre Festival or Trump or what have you is some Nietzschean cope (I may not have wealth, but at least I have taste) among the intellectually left/online is imo a pretty interesting observation, as is extending that to a critique as to how our current online moment is so toxic in general. Someone needed to update Distinction for the very online era and she's well-placed to do so, even if her take is a tad nihilistic.

I guess that would count. But what is her position on that? Concretely speaking. What is the thesis? Or an application of it.

I mean not to be glib but it just seems like that quote people love to cite from Road to Wigan Pier about lefties being mainly about hating the rich. Is there more to it than that?

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