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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29600 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 6, 2023

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If it were just called western or American culture it would at least be something people could reason about.

Problem is that more accurate naming might undermine the activists' goal of sowing racial grievences/division that can than be used to justify more activism.

I think it's worse than that. I think that if you have 99 infographics that talk about the values of western culture, and 1 infographic that talks about the values of white culture, the one about white culture will go viral and the rest will be ignored.

If there was a Coalition of Activists, and the Coalition of Activists had decided that the best way to achieve their goals was to sow racial grievances, then it would in principle be possible to convince the leadership of the Coalition of Activists not to do that. If it's "the most divisive stuff goes viral" though, you would have to convince every single activist to refrain from creating divisive stuff. There would be no single person, or small group of people, you could reason into making it stop.

I think we live in the latter world, and "can then be used to justify more activism" is attributing far more agency than actually exists to the structures that cause this sort of stuff to enter the discourse.

In the case of this particular infographic, there was in fact a hierarchical organization involved: The Smithsonian. The infographics in question were presumably selected, vetted, and approved, presumably by something approaching a "Coalition of Activists", who at least hypothetically could be "reasoned with to stop". I think in this case, a lot of why it's going viral is the number of failsafes it evidently blows through without apparent effort, not merely the content itself.

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