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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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It won't neatly map to a left/right divide, not the least because there's no single such divide. So while I can empathize with feelings of "hey, you are a leftist/rightist, this isn't what you should think about this issue!", ultimately this is not very interesting, other than showing that a binary categorization is insufficient.

The split here is between pro-tech optimists, believers in quantification, that problems of society are mainly technical etc. vs people who miss the "soul" of things.

Some leftist utopias are fully automated large scale standardized productions, but others are about local communities in opposition to capitalist exploitation (of environment and communities). The left is supposed to like disruption and new ways of solving things, except if it comes from capitalist exploitation. There's also a distinction between classical left and woke capital which is nowadays often confused with the left.

Some of the right is pro business and pro capitalist, pro-large scale production, but other parts are more religious and miss the soul of things, the traditions, like the fruit of skilled dignified hard human labour, prefer local things as opposed to multinational business output, out of patriotism and nationalism.

There are some otherwise unnatural pseudo-alliances around woke topics that may connect trads with libertarian transhumanists but things like the AI issue may be a point of collision.

My own attitude is similar to eg furniture. Sure, a skilled carpenter can make a fabulous bed frame with soul and all, and it's beautiful hard work that puts bread on the table from the sweat of the brow etc. But it's expensive and so IKEA has its place too.

Most of the pictures, illustrations and clip arts, stock images, filler crap don't need novel artistic expression. It's like lamenting the emergence of word processor software and how it displaces the fine artists that typographers and editors are, now that people can typeset their own docs. And I'm sure people said as much back in the 80s. It's the same but for drawing.

It won’t neatly map onto a left/right divide

Pandemics and vaccines weren’t supposed to be a left/right issue either, but, we saw how that turned out.

For sure and that's a good example. On the one hand Trust The Science, on the other hand science is a fake-objective old/dead white cishet male-biased colonial-legacy Western Eurocentric project that needs to be dismantled in favor of other ways of knowing like indigenous lived experience.

Similarly with big tech / big corporations. They are bd because white libertarian tech bros but also good in the sense that eg women should see it as their life goal to build a career in them.

It all depends on who feels like that they are inside and who feel outside. Academic leftists will defend the status/prestige of academic knowledge production if it's controlled by them. Similarly if big tech supports ideologically/politically motivated "fact checking", then big tech is good.

It's often not about aesthetics and principles of whether rational quantification and cold calculation and large scale factories are good or small-scale, holistic, emotionally-nice, human-level handmade stuff is good, just who feels in control, in terms of identity politics groups.

There are plenty of conservatives and far right people who don't want to "play God", do genetic engineering, AI, etc.

This really is an issue where you at least need the Red/Blue/Gray three-way distinction.