site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   33302 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 20, 2023

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.

15
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I get the feeling you wanted to rant about this stuff for a while, and used NATO tweet as a mere springboard. Okay, we've all been there, but it's not a great idea, because it's hard to engage with the meat of your argument with the subject matter still dangling in front.

I don't see what the horse-faced people or whatever have to do with it.

Just so you know, people – normal people, sometimes even smart ones – like this stuff. Avengers, Avatar, Harry Potter, Star Wars (even today's wannabe gopnik wears a Marvel T-shirt instead of Abibas, and buys his chick a counterfeit Baby Yoda for 8th of March). Videogames, movies, cartoons. More importantly, they know that everyone else likes or at least knows it, so it occupies the same niche as the Bible did for commoners in previous generations, or «the Western canon» did for intellectuals, or myths did for the ancients: it's a common inventory of archetypes and references. They cite its images and ideas, such as there are, completely unironically (if this fills you with dread, good: it should), and when institutions like NATO speak the same language, they are being at once pragmatic and democratic. Heck, the ostensibly brilliant rationalist community, of which we are an offshoot, is largely built around schlocky ratfics written by artistically inept nerds (okay, Wales is fine), chiefly a massive Harry Potter deconstruction by Big Yud (@ratboygenius, thanks, this is why I write). The modern culture is a culture of grown-up middle schoolers who have no meaningful rites of transition to adulthood, and the cultural power of your theatre kids is more a symptom than a cause.

Adding to that, Ukrainians (and as @Stefferi notes, that line comes from a Ukrainian guy) are just simple to a fault, so they mean it literally. Many Western far-righters, obsessed with the outgroup, pattern-match them to derealized current-thing-emoji Twitterati who support Ukraine, and very-online Russian influencers (as well as pretty, politically active young Ukrainian women mingling with the former crowd) are only too happy to confirm that impression, but it's mistaken. Ukrainian attitude is not from American middle school, it's more of a premodern innocence. «We are Warriors of Light guarding the gates of Europe, our enemies are Orcs, what's your problem, you piece of shit? Try me!» They don't like to overcomplicate things, like Russians do, do not stake their seriousness on big boy symbols of higher-class prestige (that's some Imperial crap!), and they suspect that self-awareness beyond the level of common sense, where it's sufficient to check if your shoelaces are tied and your fly is zipped, is either a sign of mental illness or some cringe Moskal psyop. Though, for all my condescension, I admit that pontificating on galaxy-brain matters with your fly open and slightly drunk, like Russians do, is surely worse.

The ex-advisor Arestovych, himself a fruity theatre kid par excellence and a person of unmistakably Russian intelligentsia culture (come to think of it, Zelensky is too), said in 2020:

[...] an average Ukrainian is an ideal victim of informational-semantic war. All connections in the brain are severed – causal, semantic, symbolic etc., so he's amenable to suggestion. There's an ideal gas instead of a brain: you bring a magnet to it, a dog, or Kyva, or someone else; you loom up with a meme, as we did with the blue lamp in our childhoods, and atoms of that gas, attracted, rush in that direction, stay there for a while, then rush back. From the point of view of a person dabbling in psychology it's a very edifying view. [...] Let's clarify. Information war is the war to occupy some position in the existing worldview. For example, if I as a political marketing consultant do not like your position, I try to move it somewhere. Whereas the semantic war is the war for symbols, myths and, in other words, for the possibility of creating that very worldview. The war which the professional in this question, and simultaneously the head of President Putin's Administration, calls «the war for the right to call things by their names».

Perplexingly, he means Vaino, a veritable retard who has not said anything cogent in his life. Dugin, meanwhile, wrote like 28 books in his series «Noomakhia, wars of the mind» on this topic; if there were a community of culture war scholars, I imagine its abridged version would be mandatory reading. The point of the semantic war or Noomakhia, in respect to mainstream media, is that the repertoire is loaded with premises. Say, when people's very language for discussing libertarianism and naming things pertaining to it is informed by Bioshock, you can tell their conclusions in advance (and observe it any time libertarianism is discussed within earshot of the mainstream public). Likewise for eugenics and Gattaca. Likewise for any other cultural touchstone. Avengers assemble to defeat an idealistic tyrant who threatens their zany status quo. Na'vi embrace degrowth and renounce industrial capitalism. For Ukrainians right now, only the most crude reading matters, but it's a package deal in the long run.

Arestovych goes on to speculate on four possible Ukrainian projects, mistakenly conflated into two: Nationalistic and European, and Russian and Soviet respectively. It's a shame actual Russian politics is below the level of a fruity theatre kid, and there is no positive project to offer that could challenge Hollywood propaganda. Hell, they can't even make use of it like this troll suggests.

Just so you know, people – normal people, sometimes even smart ones – like this stuff. Avengers, Avatar, Harry Potter, Star Wars (even today's wannabe gopnik wears a Marvel T-shirt instead of Abibas, and buys his chick a counterfeit Baby Yoda for 8th of March). Videogames, movies, cartoons. More importantly, they know that everyone else likes or at least knows it, so it occupies the same niche as the Bible did for commoners in previous generations, or «the Western canon» did for intellectuals, or myths did for the ancients: it's a common inventory of archetypes and references.

Crichton made mention of this in Sphere, which was published in 1987. The myths of Superman and The Wizard of Oz long ago replaced classical myth.

I'm surprised, then, that no one has apparently seized upon Mobile Suit Gundam for this reason, though maybe that's a good thing. I guess it helps that the Ukraine war has officially gone on for more than one year, and the end isn't quite in sight yet.

I don’t think that’s the issue. And if I might rant against your rant, the problem I see is that we take literally nothing seriously when discussing politics, technology or culture. I get that sometimes it’s helpful to make references to popular culture and media. But what I’ve seen, and Ukraine vs Russia is the exemplar of the moment is a complete lack of seriousness in the discourse around it. We’re pussyfooting around a situation where two nuclear powers are escalating tensions over a territory of questionable value in either direction. And we’re doing so on the basis of memes.

I can make the case for just about any possible position in response to the Russian invasion. Every one of them has serious pros and cons because war is a serious matter. A negotiation of a new border brings a hopefully stable peace, but would encourage Putin in further expansion. A proxy war with the goal of driving Russia to the 2014 borders risks a hot war between nuclear powers, but would send a strong message that we will not stand for invasion of sovereign nations. There’s a lot of history that should be a part of the discussion as well. We can’t, or won’t talk about this very very serious topic in a serious manner. Instead, Russians are uniquely evil “orcs”, and we’re talking about a potential world war in terms of movies while insisting on a new spelling for Kiev and chastising companies who still call their chicken dish “chicken Kiev” instead of “chicken Kyiv” as though Putin or anyone else gives a flying shit what we call the dish.

The rot goes deeper, and it was also quite common in discussions of COVID and the response. It wasn’t a cool rational debate about the merits of various types and levels of lockdowns. There was little discussion of the relevant risks of different activities and the risks at different ages and risk factors. We simply screamed at anyone who wanted to leave the house.

My thinking is that we are, as the Chinese observed at one point, and unserious people. We aren’t having rational debates and choosing reasonable alternatives. We aren’t discussing the facts on the ground. We’ve become the people defending Ukraine from orcs, Jewish space lasers, and freedom fries. And this is not a sign of a healthy civilization. This is a society clearly shrinking back into a deman-haunted world in which the entirety of thinking about very serious issues must be reduced to children’s movie references or image macros to be digestible by the public.

The fact we can be so unserious, yet still rule the world just shows how powerful we are. We can talk about the Avengers, then drop decades old tech in the DOD equivalent of the backyard shed and basically ruin Russia's ability to make progress.

Well, for now sure, but how long can a country that thinks in memes and slogans maintain its power? How does a people who consider “owning the out group” to be the height of discourse solve problems that face it? How does such a society build for the future? Especially given the near scientific illiteracy and practical innumeracy, this is a serious problem. We are amusing ourselves to death, or at least to irrelevance. Everything is a joke.

I mean, considering they were nerdy guys, I'm sure more than a few people who made the atomic bomb read sci-fi stories, still looked at the original comic book, and may have enjoyed some westerns or noir films. It wasn't all Oppenheimer quotes all the time. It's just today, the line is less clear, and people are more open about their hobbies. Hell, we had people involved in the creation of the beginnings of space industry that were weird sex cultists.

It doesn't really matter how scientifically literate the median American is, as long as the coffers still go to various scientific endeavors, who turn out can invent new things and use the gender somebody prefers the same time, just like they got used to having non-white males as co-workers.

It wasn't all Oppenheimer quotes all the time.

Oppenheimer's most famous quote is actually from a story anyway, the Bhagavad Gita.

True, the inventor of actual AI might quote an anime or whatever.

As Eetan said, we have always thought in terms of memes and slogans. Memes, are, after all, the DNA of the soul. The Bible represents one of the oldest memes still-extant in civilization, and its adherents literally referred to the central narrative of the New Testament as "The Greatest Story Ever Told," IIRC. When I was growing up, we learned about the history of America practically through famous quotes and slogans: No Taxation Without Representation; Give Me Liberty, or Give Me Death; Four Score And Seven Years Ago; etc.

Sure, it feels cheap that many of the narratives of the newer generation were forged by wholly human hands without even the pretense of divine revelation or the claim of being a genuine record of the ineffable acting in our world, but at least they're still narratives. Perhaps the conflict lies in the tropes (or, rather, their usage) and not the actual messages attempting to be imparted.

Well, for now sure, but how long can a country that thinks in memes and slogans maintain its power?

Power was always about memes, and West/NATO power had never been greater.

Ancient leader motivated his troops by talking about mythical heroes, medieval would motivate his troops with inspiring pep talk about Bible and knightly romances.

The conquistadors, who managed the most brilliant feats of arms in history, were weebs living in fictional world of trash literature of their day.

"And as we saw so many cities and inhabited villages in the water, and many other large settlements on land, and the road that led to Mexico, we were stupefied ['admirados'], and we said that it all these things seemed like the enchantments recounted in the book of Amadís."

Now, NATO has Harry Potter and the Avengers. What does Russia have?

Cheburashka?

What does Russia have?

Salacious refrigerators, as it turns out. And the cult of progress in general, as the other cornerstone post-Soviet myth has now been repeated, as Marx postulated, as a farce. Soviet heritage aside, we've been worriedly looking for new memes since 1999:

"You see, let me just explain the situation to you, like the way it is," said Vovchik. "Our national business enters the international arena. And there's all kinds of dough out there - Chechen, American, Colombian, if you know what I'm saying. And if you just look at them as money, they're all the same. But behind all this money there is actually some kind of national idea. We used to have Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality. Then we had this communism. And now that it is all over, there is no such idea at all, except for the dough itself. But you can't just have the dough justify the dough, right? Because then it is purely incomprehensible - why are some ahead and the others behind?"

"And when our Russian dollars are circulating somewhere in the Caribbean," Vovchik went on, "you can't even really understand why they are Russian dollars. We lack national i-den-ti-ty..."

"Get it? The Chechens have it, but we don't. That's why they look at us like shit. What we need is a clear and simple Russian idea, so that we can explain to any bitch from any Harvard: rub-a-dub-dub, and don't look at us like that. And we should know where we come from, too, anyway."

"The task is simple," said Vovchik. "Write me a Russian idea, about five pages long. And a short version on one page. Make it straightforward, no smartassery. So that I could sort it out with any foreign faggot - a businessman, a singer, or anyone else. So that they wouldn't think that we here in Russia just stole the money and put up a steel door. So that they would feel such spirituality, these whores, like they did at Stalingrad in 1945, understand?"

I largely agree that that's a completely horrible and infuriating aspect of our discourse, and I really really wish we could do better. But I want to question how we could do it better. Has there been a society that has done it better? It would be good to have the people in power giving fewer shits about what the mobs on Twitter say they care about. But before it was Twitter, was there probably some other mechanism that was the completely horrible public square. I just find it hard to believe that masses of people were ever able to make good rational decisions.

We don't have to look far or deep to find indications that masses of people always acted as a bunch of complete idiots. Just look at Shakespeare's depiction of Brutus vs Mark Antony's speeches and how the crowd reacts to them in Julius Caesar.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats