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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31877 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 10, 2023

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Is there a conclusion, some big lesson to learn? I don't know. But maybe it's an interesting data point for how the culture war projects down to the periphery such as Hungary.

If you take @KulakRevolt's most recent article seriously, the correct social immune response to a foreign meme is to react immediately to shut it down. Better that it's done with repainting and national colors than a can of petrol.

This calls for a whatcoloristhebench.com

Amnesty International

Why are they painting benches in randome eastern european towns?

It's a capital city with ca 2 million people, it's not like a random Eastern European town. Amnesty is an international organization with its own Hungarian branch, after all.

The description of the district shows it's dominated by the Hungarian opposition and generally seems like it's probably the hipster district of Budapest, so the local public administration might as well have invited them.

They notably got in quite a bit of hot water last year over accusing Ukraine of committing war crimes by defending populated areas.

It was not simply for defending populated areas. It was for fighting from within them. Doing this legitimized Russia in bombing those areas, because it stops being a war crime to attack civilian-occupied areas unprovoked when you have credible reason to believe in potential enemy presence there (i.e. dozens of social media videos and reports of Ukrainians fighting from within those areas).

A better question is, why do random Eastern European towns let an NGO (aka a lobbying group) do anything whatsoever to public property?

Probably for the same reason the Texas democrats insist on nominating unelectable flashy progressives for statelevel offices- Budapest is not in agreement with the rest of the country, and outside support is conditioned on stuff like this.

I guess it depends on how these things work. Do NGOs tend to hire locals? I'm imagining the modal E. European townspeople can't just go "it's because of those Americans that rolled into town" in cases like these.

Imagine you were a donor, thinking you were sending money to help refugees at the Thai border or women in Saudi Arabia. And then there's this.

It's probably not actually a huge burden in terms of financial resources, but the time and energy being spent to antagonize locals instead of something core to its mission is shocking.

Honestly the donors probably love this. Anything to paint the other side as anti gay bigots likely plays well.

Rhetorical question, Amnesty has been on the side of the devils since inception.

To foment a Color Revolution

I groaned in a moderate amount of pain.

God fucking damn it

I look forward to a future where everyone wears augmented reality glasses and can make the bench appear to them however they want.

This will never be allowed.

Do you remember the guy who modded the Spider-Man game to change LGBTQ+ rainbow flags into American flags (the game is set in New York City) and got his account banned for homophobia for daring to touch the sacred pride flag? That's right: users who bought and paid for the video game are not allowed to change the flag in the game they play on their own computer!

Also, did you know there is another mod for the same game that changes all the American flags in the game into LGTBQ+ flags, and this is perfectly allowed?

Given that, why do you think your augmented reality glasses (courtesy of Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or another ESG-compliant mega-corp) would allow you to remove the mandatory pride colors from the bench, you fucking bigot?

The future in which no one cares what you think is the future where you don't matter to anyone at all.

In 1984 terms:

  • The inner party (top 2%). The ones who paint the bench and force others to accept it. (Amnesty)

  • The outer party (top 10%). The ones who must endure the bench being painted. (Hungary)

  • The proles (bottom 88%). The ones whose opinion is not strongly policed because they have no power or importance whatsoever. (Africa)

But that’s not the point of painting the bench rainbow-colored in the first place. It’s not just that the activists painting the bench would personally prefer to see a rainbow bench— they’re explicitly doing so in order for other people to see it. “We’re loud, we’re proud” and all that. If such augmented reality goggles emerged with an option to display the bench brown, then that would be tarred as homophobic.

In fact, this hypothetical almost perfectly recalls that actual time when mods for a Spiderman game that removed rainbow flags from the game were scrubbed from all mainstream modding websites.

The funniest bit is they just used the Middle East localization files, which didn't have the rainbow flags in the first place.

Yep, that’s the big irony. Of course, the most parsimonious way you can analyze it is as an out-group/far-group thing: Middle Easterners are the far-group, Anglophone anti-LGBTers are the out-group.

Someone could win the internet for the day by editing this gif with the relevant colors.

July 13 - The far-right parliamentary party Our Homeland Movement repainted the bench to the Hungarian national colors of red-white-green the same day. Apparently nobody actually guarded it.

Honestly getting a group of activists to guerrilla-repaint LGBT murals in local flag colors is such low hanging fruit I’m surprised no other Conservative Party has decided to do it.

Sounds like a great Eighth Amendment test case. With a dash of the First for flavour.

If it was owned by a specific LGBT individual. Not if it was owned by a city.

Almost certainly not. A "hate crime" is a regular crime that is committed because of the status of the victim. There is really no victim here. If I vandalize a mosque or some such, that might be a hate crime. But as I understand it, this is a publicly owned bench.

It does seem to be charged rather more heavily (as a 'non' hate crime) than your average burnout though:

https://www.wptv.com/news/region-s-palm-beach-county/delray-beach/man-who-defaced-pride-crosswalk-in-delray-beach-pleads-guilty

Is that particularly surprising? The average burnout is not intentional vandalism; moreover, no one is likely to even notice tire marks on a generic street.

The average burnout is not intentional vandalism

How do you know that? The behavior seems just as intentional to me

no one is likely to even notice tire marks on a generic street.

What? They're very noticeable.

The behavior seems just as intentional to me The action might be just as intentional, but the outcome is not. One is apparently meant to destroy the artwork. The other is not meant to destroy anything. There is a difference between painting "Kilroy was here" on a wall and painting "fuck you" on a car.

Maybe don't put your artwork on a street if you don't want it getting tire tracks on it?

More comments

There's been several cases where people did various things to rainbow road-crossing markers, and while some have found specifically that the state's or city's property could not be a valid target for hate crime purposes under existing law, this does seem to be a specific statutory thing.

Yes, part of the issue is that it has to be based on something more than the defendant's dislike, etc, of the group, because of R.A.V. v. City of St Paul:

As explained earlier, see supra, at 386, the reason why fighting words are categorically excluded from the protection of the First Amendment is not that their content communicates any particular idea, but that their content embodies a particularly intolerable (and socially unnecessary) mode of expressing whatever idea the speaker wishes to convey. St. Paul has not singled out an especially offensive mode of expression—it has not, for example, selected for prohibition only those fighting words that communicate ideas in a threatening (as opposed to a merely obnoxious) manner. Rather, it has proscribed fighting words of whatever manner that communicate messages of racial, gender, or religious intolerance. Selectivity of this sort creates the possibility that the city is seeking to handicap the expression of particular ideas. That possibility would alone be enough to render the ordinance presumptively invalid, but St. Paul's comments and concessions in this case elevate the possibility to a certainty.

I am having trouble imagining how a statute would thread the needle such that painting a public bench to express disapproval of views would be punishable as a hate crime.

Amnesty is really spending its credit on a rainbow bench, eh? At least the local hardware stores must be doing a roaring trade in paint 😁

And really, if a silly fight over painting a bench is the worst that happens, it's all good.

It’s Milgram and Robbers Cave all the way down.

Both of those were faked, if memory serves.

No? I guess you could say they were “faked” in the sense that all social science experiments are “faked”.

What I have seen are allegations that the experiments were unethical, usually framed in a way that suggests the results cannot be trusted (the suggestion is transparently bullshit. Anyone with the slightest understanding of the scientific method knows that informed consent forms make experiments less reliable). You may have been misled by one of them.

Robbers Cave was the second run at the same experiment, run specifically because the first attempt had too much cooperation between the two 'teams', and this wasn't disclosed in Sherif's paper. Worse and perhaps more critically, the paper heavily concealed the extent Sherif (in the first experiment) and OJ Harvey (in Robbers Cave proper) actively manipulated the participants to make them more aggressive or be more affected by the aggression of other participants. It's not as severely a fake as, say, Stanford Prison, but Harvey was on-record as it being a script with an intended conclusion.

Milgram had a lot of information available suggesting that a significant number of his experiment subjects knew or claimed to know that the actor was acting, enough to overturn the conclusions, along with not actually holding to his claimed experimental protocol very consistently. Which is less severe and more borderline as 'faked', but (hopefully!) worse than all social science experiments.

My understanding is that Robber's Cave involved a lot of manipulation by the experimenters to get the boys to behave one way, and that by changing the circumstances they were able to get them all to work together again. "Fake" is an exaggeration, but the standard interpretation of the results may not be correct. E.g. https://www.simplypsychology.org/robbers-cave.html mentions this.

I'm less familiar with the Milligan experiment, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#Validity indicates that the reported data may be inaccurate or missing key information. The section https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment#Replications_and_variations indicates that the results could be highly dependent on situation.

It's significantly realer than most social science experiments, because it's been replicated not just once but dozens of times, by different researchers in different contexts. (Though, as you note, the replications are weaker than the original experiment because there's more informed consent.)

All of these factions are just unwitting pawns of Big Paint.

Has Sherwin-Williams be accumulating seating stock in eastern Europe?

In the same ninth district of Budapest where two years ago a BLM/LGBTQ kneeling statue of liberty was installed and destroyed soon after,

Amazing story. The American Empire's cultural reach is truly beyond anything I'm aware of existing in all of history. I can barely imagine having to explain to Grover Cleveland what the layered symbols here mean and what the hell they're doing in Budapest.

Unknown people repainted the bench back to the original brown with a sign saying "I just want to be a bench. Which is good for everyone. For you, for him/her. For us."

I like these guys, but I think Auron Macintyre is correct that the side that wants to win will always beat the side that just wants to be left alone.

I can barely imagine having to explain to Grover Cleveland what the layered symbols here mean and what the hell they're doing in Budapest.

It’s gonna blow your mind when I tell you what Thomas Jefferson was up to in 1789.

Tell me. My mind is ready.

Please elaborate/explain?

Thomas Jefferson was United States minister to France from 1784 to 1789, i.e. before and during the French Revolution. His famous quote, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants," was written in Paris. Jefferson was also a major consultant on The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. The Marquis de Lafayette, a major figure in the French Revolution, fought in the American Revolution and was personal friends with Jefferson. America has been exporting revolutionary ideas longer than it's had a constitution.

Amazing story. The American Empire's cultural reach is truly beyond anything I'm aware of existing in all of history. I can barely imagine having to explain to Grover Cleveland what the layered symbols here mean and what the hell they're doing in Budapest.

This is still relatively mild, the rainbow flag isn't particularly American (although now I see they added the trans colors to it, which might be indicative of Americanization). My go-to example of the mind blowing reach of the American Empire is the George Floyd mural in Kabul.

I like these guys, but I think Auron Macintyre is correct that the side that wants to win will always beat the side that just wants to be left alone.

Probably, but I don't know if there's a way to win without becoming an utter sociopath, making me want to nope out of the whole game even more.

the rainbow flag isn't particularly American

The one with the black and brown is extremely American, given that grievance politics about the people who happen to be that color is a unique export from them.

My personal goal is to add another element to the pride flag. It won't mean anything except "you better put this in here too you bigot". I'm thinking maybe a pink and green crescent in the top-right corner.

The one group best represented by the Pride flag is the only one whose skin color is not actually on the flag. (Unless I misread it and the trans flag has all 3 of its colors in there, but I was certain it was only the pink and blue.)

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