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.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I've decided to abstain from responding to you the last time you wrote it, because – as before – I did not recognize you as a good faith interlocutor. (Btw, @2rafa, despite listening to OSTs often I just dislike Zimmer's music and Zimmer personally, but then again I'm not very into Wagner and all that Teutonic BS either). Thinking back on it, you might just find some aspects of the German character amiable. After all, Berdyaev did say in «Religion of Germanism»:
But, of course, Berdyaev spoke of German intellectuals – mainly as they appeared to him in written media. This would be as naive as judging Anglo Dasein/Umwelt/Weltanschauung by their stiff-lipped Victorian hypocrisy.
I knew normal Germans. To ask of normal people, even Germans, to be satisfied with just this is, at best, a ludicrous demand for universal ascetic monasticism; more likely it is mere cope. You can call math beautiful all you want, but math remains a niche, inaccessible (no, condescending popular renditions don't count) realm, and it doesn't have remotely the dimensionality to saturate human experience for any but the most obsessed, broken specimens. We are physical beasts, homeostatic machines connected to the world through a multimodal sensor array and burdened with demanding natural priors with narrow optimal response ranges, that ensure we can't stop caring about what happens around us. We are grounded in reality, so for our own sanity we should see pleasing sights on the ground level – pleasant faces, buildings, furniture, plants and so on. And in terms of intangible art, it need be grounded in baseline human experience as well – thus, even videogames with narratives touch us more than the most contrived category theory wankery; and the capacity to produce such videogames says more about the people's cultural capacity than having some Hausdorff Center for Mathematics. Some Germans can into math. Great. Math isn't about Germans, though. Math isn't about humans at all. And Germans know this as well as I do.
Suggesting a person take refuge from the squalor of the material world in the work of Peter Scholze is as ridiculous and cruel as telling a hungry person to contemplate some 19th century still-life paintings of peaches or whatever; a person who wants sex to embrace the holy love of Virgin Mary (and we know that this just ends in pathetic perversion). Speaking of, the best mathematicians I interact with have high libido, they seem to need lots of intense, dirty sex. (For more traditionally creative types this needn't even be said). They also care vastly more about art than I do, somehow – some fantasy book series, musical performances, and yes, even video games.
Humans are humans, they are not spirit engines for contemplating toy imaginary structures. With this «what even is beauty, ackchyually» you deny us our humanity. And I suspect you do this to excuse the expropriation of control over the physical world from people who do not satisfy your elitist cerebral standards.
You are under no obligation to reply to anything, though you also have no justifiable reason to claim that I'm not a good faith interlocutor. It's like clockwork, every time you reply to something I post here it needs to include at least one unjustified personal attack. Please stop.
As for the rest of your comment, this is just a very poetic way to express what it feels like to be confronted with aesthetic preferences different from your own. The point of my original comment is explained in more detail here and the way to argue against it is to discuss why your personal aesthetic preferences are actually universal enough, not post a bunch of poetry about why you think they're superior.
I think my reasons are justified for years now, and you have not appropriately expressed remorse for your terrible faux-rationalist rhetoric back on reddit before continuing it here, so I'd rather you start making arguments in good faith than I stop reminding people of your track record. By the way, putting on a layer of patronizing Brahmin politeness improves your performance somewhat, but not by a lot, I suggest you leave it for your workplace.
There is no need to argue against a vacuous truism that something is "true" if we assume an arbitrary classification system where it is true; only an infertile mind of a pedant can be satisfied with such an argument. I of course agree that beauty is in the eye of the beholder and in principle some people can recognize whatever as beautiful, even a slum filled with diseased drug addicts where one gets to read Scholze's papers. And Wittgenstein masturbated to mathematical problems in the trenches of World War I, after all. But the reason we know of this fact is precisely that it is unusual, baffling. Your preferences, if those are your preferences indeed, are marginal, thus prioritizing them would be unsatisfactory to most people; you're free to put the opposite hypothesis to a democratic test and, I'd expect, get the same result as here in any group except self-selected minority of mathematical ascetics.
Though there may be something more here. Naturally this ties in to your general theme that white people ought to welcome being replaced by "elite human capital" like yourself. White people did not think to implement a filter for compatible aesthetic preferences, even as they demanded professional merit and some minimum of adherence to the letter of the law; so now there'll be a marginally greater tendency for their habitats to approximate the noisy, debased squalor of the subcontinent, complete with galaxy-brained equivocation excusing this. Too bad.
I was vaguely amused to see this pop up in the janitorial duties, this is probably one of the most eloquently written comments that's not there for 'Quality Contribution'.
That said, is there really a need for a fallacy in every sentence? The whole first paragraph is just bad blood coagulated into an ugly scab that's regurgitated ad hominem.
Next, I don't see @atokenliberal6D_4 suggesting mathematics is beautiful or a salve for diseased slums, just a counterpoint to the general narrative of decay and deterioration that permeates contemporary (and perhaps all human) rhetoric. You prop up a straw Colossus and then toss it ad populum, for them to supposedly tear apart with their physical, homeostatic hands.
As a crown of thorns for this cute little sophistical sermon, you conjure up some bizarre racial slippery slope whereby lack of aesthetic compatibility is leading to the decay of civilization.
The tone and style had me err on Bad, but after writing this up this I think it honestly deserves a warning it's so grotesquely specious.
Modern architecture is mostly horrific for reasons elaborate upon a myriad times. Usually having to do with architectural schools, snobbery and that the last pre-apocalyptic generations have died.. generations ago.
You can't argue we are not decaying. People in 1960s had the entire world at their fingertips. Energy is wealth, always has been, and especially so since the invention of electricity. Unparalleled growth without having to pollute was available.
For the first time in human history, we're utterly free from the need to burn stuff for energy. Yet what do Europeans do ? They erect barriers so that this doesn't happen. According to those nice graphs by German economic ministry, per capita energy production in Germany right now should've been 5x current level. The entire country could have been carbon-free, with electric heaters everywhere and probably enough energy to spare to move to entirely synthetic fuels.
No need for Russians, Americans, Arabs or even strip mining!
Where are we ? Collapsing industries due to energy costs, debt up to almost everyone's eyeballs.. europe is importing dead trees from America to burn in power plants and patting itself on the back for it being low-carbon!
The French were the only one who kind of grasped it yet they hadn't gone far enough. Still they have very affordable power and a great pollution profile.
Define modern. The Louvre pyramid for example, widely decried at conception, is now a architectural monument to modernism at the heart of one of the pinnacle achievements of Renaissance work. Niemayer in Brazil? Le Corbusier? Art Deco in the 30s?
Chill with the consensus buliding.
This is temporary nonsense due to geopolitical machinations. Gasoline is more expensive in the US than it historically has been, but electricity has fallen almost 100% since 1900, despite machinery and tools becoming vastly more efficient (not to mention the exponential compounding of computing power for fixed energy use). CPI-adjusted electricity has continued to fall since 2000, from 0.172 to 0.159 $/kWh.
The Louvre pyramid is hideous. So is everything by Le Corbusier, whose autism is now less of a secret. Of course someone with sensory abnormalities and rigid thinking is going to like soul-less geometric architecture.
Brasilia, the city, is an example of how not to build cities. It has a few striking buildings, it's however not a good place to live at all.
You're insane. Gas imports from Russia are not coming back.
Large scale nuclear build-up is impossible without repurposing a bunch of European football stadiums into execution grounds and and getting rid of tens of thousands of bureaucrats, environmental activists, environmental lawyers and other people whose jobs are ensuring NOTHING EVER HAPPENS.
Europe is a hospice and will keep being so until we do the above.
.. isn't it up by 100% of percent since 1970?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There is nothing to his «counterpoint» but speciousness. «How could you say Germans don't produce beautiful art any more, they have Scholze!». They used to have Gauss, but they also had Beethoven and Caspar David Friedrich in the same era, and it is not through the former that they had accrued the reputation of people who can do art. We understand that mathematics is a very non-central case of artistic or aesthetic achievement. Worse yet, by cheekily claiming that the mainstream understanding of beauty is «idiosyncratic» (that is, somewhat unusual), he lies and gaslights.
Not decay of civilization as a whole, I admit this would be a stretch, but as for the decay of aesthetic standards assumed to be common sense, the causal relationship is trivial enough. South Asian (Indian, really) culture is amazingly tolerant of squalor, dirt and ugliness, not only by White/European/First World standards – nowhere else, in no destitute hellhole, do people care so little to maintain cleanliness and tasteful sights. this has been discussed to death here and elsewhere (I would also say they are near-universally tasteless, more so than Germans, but that's more objectionable). It is reasonable to expect that transplants from this culture, ceteris paribus, will be less demanding aesthetically, and prioritize some other stuff.
How widely appreciated are Beethoven or Caspar David Friedrich nowadays?
Consensus building.
I'll bite that many countries in development are less likely to invest in architectural aesthetics and maintenance, but this has always been the case for politically/economically unstable regions. Is there evidence that Indians in the United States who become Americanized (2nd, 3rd generation immigrants) and wealthy continue to neglect aesthetic construction?
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Never heard of it, but man is it accurate for my inner workings.
Conclusion:
Didn't work out well for either party (well, Berdyaev himself did okay, first in Berlin, then in Paris). But Russians got their minute of fame as the standard bearers of the new worldwide Messianic delusion, making full use of German-Jewish faux-materialism.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
I don’t think Zimmer is a great composer (certainly not in the pantheon of great Jewish composers). He has suffered from the Inception foghorn becoming a central meme in film scoring, though. It’s quite endearing he posts, aged 65 and probably along with John Williams the single most recognizable name in his field, on niche music composition forums to dunk on his critics though, especially of the “post track, retard” variety.
I like to think that if the other person had dropped something stellar he would have made true of his offer to have them score a major movie.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link